4 ms·

Look, I get it, you're a power user with very special needs. But the rest of the home user world is on a different page. It's funny if you think home users in g

Look, I get it, you're a power user with very special needs. But the rest of the home user world is on a different page. It's funny if you think home users in general have these kinds of wants or needs just because you're a user, at home. The data volumes, the cost even before we look at the TCO, the performance characteristics, the time/expertise requirements, the need (hassle) for proper storage and retrieval really kill the attraction of tape for home use. For the backup (and storage as a bonus) needs of most home users cloud or external drives are unbeatable, especially in combination.

bombcar 1y ago
I should have been more precise - by “home user” I meant people who run DataCenter equipment at home; datahoarders and homelabs.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  What I have said is that for this kind of home users external HDDs are obviously the right solution as long as the total amount of stored data is not much more than 100 TB. For some threshold in the hundreds of TB range, magnetic tapes become cheaper, despite the huge price of a tape drive, while offering additional advantages, e.g. higher sequential reading and writing speeds and higher reliability. Moreover, when computing the size of the stored data, one should take into account that the useful data size, after data compression, should be multiplied with 1.05 or 1.10, because you should add redundancy with a code able to reconstruct the data when only a small part of it is corrupted, then you should multiply by 2 or by 3, because any long-term archives must be stored as duplicated or even triplicated on different HDDs or tape cartridges, which are preferably kept at different geographical locations. Only with such precautions you can be pretty certain that no data loss will occur after many years of data storage, reaching a reliability comparable with that of printed paper.
hulitu 1y ago
> For the backup (and storage as a bonus) needs of most home users cloud or external drives are unbeatable, especially in combination. Cloud is not a backup. Cloud is someone else's storage.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

bombcar 1y ago

I should have been more precise - by “home user” I meant people who run DataCenter equipment at home; datahoarders and homelabs.

adrian_b 1y ago
What I have said is that for this kind of home users external HDDs are obviously the right solution as long as the total amount of stored data is not much more than 100 TB. For some threshold in the hundreds of TB range, magnetic tapes become cheaper, despite the huge price of a tape drive, while offering additional advantages, e.g. higher sequential reading and writing speeds and higher reliability. Moreover, when computing the size of the stored data, one should take into account that the useful data size, after data compression, should be multiplied with 1.05 or 1.10, because you should add redundancy with a code able to reconstruct the data when only a small part of it is corrupted, then you should multiply by 2 or by 3, because any long-term archives must be stored as duplicated or even triplicated on different HDDs or tape cartridges, which are preferably kept at different geographical locations. Only with such precautions you can be pretty certain that no data loss will occur after many years of data storage, reaching a reliability comparable with that of printed paper.

hulitu 1y ago

> For the backup (and storage as a bonus) needs of most home users cloud or external drives are unbeatable, especially in combination. Cloud is not a backup. Cloud is someone else's storage.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]