7 ms·

I still use optical discs for my personal backups and have done since 95. My biggest concern is whether I will still be able to buy new drives and blank media i

I still use optical discs for my personal backups and have done since 95. My biggest concern is whether I will still be able to buy new drives and blank media in 10, 20 years. Or physical media at all... Please do not say LTO tapes. The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).

dlcarrier 8mo ago
The larger issue with tapes is that the small magnetic domains don't hold data as long as the mechanical changes in optical disks.
- adrian_b 8mo ago
  The tapes are guaranteed for 30 years. Most optical discs do not have any guarantees about lifetime and the worst of them may survive only a few years. There have existed special quality optical discs with gold mirrors that were guaranteed for 100 years, but those are no longer produced and a single modern tape cartridge stores as much data as thousands of those discs. There are several mechanisms of degradation of optical discs. If the plastic does not seal well enough the metallic mirror, the metal can become oxidized and transparent, so it no longer reflects enough of the laser light. This is why certain archival discs used gold mirrors, which cannot oxidize. The plastic resin may also degrade in various ways and cause disc deformation.
  - AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
    Any guarantee made by manufacturer about data on tape longevity is irrelevant unless it is easy for user to create the storage conditions under which is warranted, and that is usually not cheap. not hard to find stories about data on LTO tapes being unreadable after 5 years. The same as stories of data on even the worst CD-Rs being still readable after 30 years ( i can personaly attest to that).
    - adrian_b 8mo ago
      Some CD-Rs will certainly be readable after 30 years, but there have been plenty of bad CD-Rs that have become unreadable after less than 10 years. I had several hundred CD-Rs. Most of them were OK, especially the gold archival CD-Rs from Kodak, so I have migrated the data from them mostly to save space and improve access speed, not for them being too old. Nevertheless there have been a few that have gone bad, but I had duplicates for all of them, so I did not lose the data. Had I not been cautious, I would have lost some of the data. The main problem of optical discs is their much too low capacity in comparison with magnetic media. A small suitcase with tape cartridges contains as much data as a big cabinet full of the most dense optical discs.
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  - wolvoleo 8mo ago
    The CD-Rs had an active organic layer that oxidizes, even if the mirror is gold. Some kind of rewritables weren't organic as far as I remember. Also CD-Rs have the active layer (top) exposed to the air, but that was solved with DVDs which are a sandwich (which though caused its own issues with shearing)
kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
> The drives are huge You can get 5.25" bay drives.
- buildbot 8mo ago
  I believe they are all 5.25in, some are just in a case. Even the library drives are just two 5.25 bays put together, a full height drive; vs. the much more common half height.
buckle8017 8mo ago
> The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes). Sure but old drives are widely available at low prices.
- buildbot 8mo ago
  This is true - I got a fiber channel LTO-8 FH drive off ebay brand new in the IBM packaging for less than 750$ Tapes are 60; so breaking even against 15$ per TB HDDs is pretty fast.
- AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
  No, they are not. Specially when you have to find the one drive that will read your tapes , connect to your computer, and many other constraints that a user will have.
  - adrian_b 8mo ago
    The connection to a computer does not have any special challenges, except that the computer must be a desktop with a free PCIe slot. Unless you have a server motherboard with an on-board SAS controller, you need to buy a SAS HBA card, put it in your desktop and also buy a compatible SAS cable, in order to connect an LTO tape drive to the computer. New tape drives are extremely expensive, e.g. $4500 for the last generation of LTO-9 tapes (18 TB/cartridge), but if you store at least a few hundred TB of data you recover the cost of the drive from the cost difference between HDDs and tape cartridges. I have an older LTO-7 (6 TB/cartridge) tabletop drive, which has cost me $3000 about 7 or 8 years ago (new), and there are several years since I have recovered its cost. If you do not intend to store more than 100 TB, the cheapest solution is to buy external HDDs, but for long term storage you must plan to migrate the data periodically, as the lifetime of HDDs is hard to predict and unlikely to be much greater than 5 years.
  - buckle8017 8mo ago
    I was genuinely confused by your comment so I went looking on ebay. Why are they so expensive now? they used to be dirt cheap
buildbot 8mo ago
You can still buy brand new LTO-4 and up from a brief search - I think due to the enterprise use cases it’ll hang around longer than any other format. Tape existed before the HDD; it’ll be there watching HDDS pass away into the ether too. Probably a few tape drives on the Starship Enterprise somewhere. More seriously; you can buy used lto-7/8 for very little these days, and the tapes are extremely cheap per gb. The drives are somewhat loud; it’s not a beside device for sure. I’m finding it a bit of a pain to manage a good backup strategy with them.
- GTP 8mo ago
  AFAIK the tapes are cheap, but tape libs aren't. Considering that they also take up a significant amount of space, I personally don't see them as a viable backup medium for most private users.
  - protimewaster 8mo ago
    You don't necessarily need a lib, though. Especially if you're interested in a use case where you can store data in a go bag, safe deposit box, etc., it seems like having individual tapes would be preferable. Individual used drives aren't too expensive (or at least didn't used to be). Libraries, in contrast, do tend to be more expensive (and also a lot more trouble to ship).
- AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
  You put exactly why I said do not mention LTO - You suggest buying multidecade old drives that are no longer manufactured, have weird interfaces that your 2026 PC no longer has, are expensive, large, noisy - You then mention LTO7 which will not read your LTO4 tapes and is not just expensive but literally out of reach economically for single home Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes). Or you have so much data to backup that cost of drives is not really an issue.
  - 8mo ago
adrian_b 8mo ago
New drives must read and write the previous generation of tapes and they must read the tape generation that was before the previous.
- AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
  Which is disgrace when you consider that no optical drive is yet available that will not read original red book cd roms from the 80s. You say "it can read from one generation ago" as if it was some great thing about LTO when it is just a laughably fast obsolescence policy and what really kills it for a home user. A blueray drive manufactured today can still fscking write to a 90s CD-R from way before LTO even existed.
  - adrian_b 8mo ago
    That is easy for optical drives, because there is no direct relationship between the size of bits on the optical track and the dimensions of the read/write laser head. For magnetic media, the gaps in the magnetic circuit of the read/write heads are optimized for a certain dimension of the bits from the tape material and the efficiency of the read/write process greatly diminishes for other bit sizes. So there is no obsolescence policy, but there is a real technical difficulty in ensuring compatibility with older magnetic media with different bit densities.
    - AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
      That is not that simple. There is a relationship between laser and media, most optical drives to this day have entirely separate lasers for different generations of media. At the very least, red vs blue lasers. It is not as simple as claiming that optical drives have it easier technologically. If anything, I would claim that tapes have it simpler, definitely for reading at least. There is _nothing_ preventing LTO from retrocompatibility other than market forces.
- Dylan16807 8mo ago
  That's not true anymore.
aidenn0 8mo ago
> Please do not say LTO tapes. Literally every single reply to this comment mentions LTO; never change HN.
- Spooky23 8mo ago
  HN is full of people who backup but never restore. Lol
- AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
  I specifically said do not mention LTO because I knew it would happen. LTO-advocates fail to see how pointless LTO is for someone who is well-served by a backup/archival strategy that uses optical media. When I say "I'm concerned about whether I could buy newly manufactured drives and media in 10,20 years", the answer cannot possibly be "LTO". Because in order for LTO to make any economical sense, I would have to buy ancient LTO drives, and ancient LTO media compatible with those drives, and ancient computers compatible with the interfaces used by those drives. Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then? Compare this to BD where in at least today you can buy a simple and cheap USB drive and new media, all of them manufactured today, and not break the bank while doing so. And drives have evolved from $propietary->PATA->SATA->USB, keeping up with the times and interfaces. (Interestingly, I can also buy newly manufactured USB 3.5inch floppy drives. But not media.) I mean, certainly LTO has its advantages, but in the same way that someone requiring to archive 8TB of data would likely screech if asked to do so with BD media, it just doesn't make sense to suggest LTO as a long-term alternative here.
  - buildbot 8mo ago
    Really the one thing that's guaranteed to be manufactured in N years is _some kind of storage_. I wouldn't buy LTO-1 now, but later gens are going to be around for some time, just like CD-ROMs and other optical media, in some form. And readers will always exist barring an asteroid impact or whatever. >Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then? You can still buy brand new LTO-1 media from 2000 - 26 years old. You shouldn't, but you can. https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_183800_p/183800.html https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_1... Then here's a cheap drive https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408 https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408 So if you needed to restore a backup from 26 years ago, it would not cost you very much.
surfaceofthesun 8mo ago
I’m in a similar boat. The USB to SATA adapter has kept my 5.25” drive going for quite a few years. Some of my discs are hitting a decade and I am about to create a new set of backups. The market is smaller but the portable blu ray drives are becoming the default now. So far I’ve just kept extra discs on hand plus a backup portable drive. Hopefully blu ray discs will manage to stick around as long as writable dvds.

dlcarrier 8mo ago

The larger issue with tapes is that the small magnetic domains don't hold data as long as the mechanical changes in optical disks.

adrian_b 8mo ago
The tapes are guaranteed for 30 years. Most optical discs do not have any guarantees about lifetime and the worst of them may survive only a few years. There have existed special quality optical discs with gold mirrors that were guaranteed for 100 years, but those are no longer produced and a single modern tape cartridge stores as much data as thousands of those discs. There are several mechanisms of degradation of optical discs. If the plastic does not seal well enough the metallic mirror, the metal can become oxidized and transparent, so it no longer reflects enough of the laser light. This is why certain archival discs used gold mirrors, which cannot oxidize. The plastic resin may also degrade in various ways and cause disc deformation.
- AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
  Any guarantee made by manufacturer about data on tape longevity is irrelevant unless it is easy for user to create the storage conditions under which is warranted, and that is usually not cheap. not hard to find stories about data on LTO tapes being unreadable after 5 years. The same as stories of data on even the worst CD-Rs being still readable after 30 years ( i can personaly attest to that).
  - adrian_b 8mo ago
    Some CD-Rs will certainly be readable after 30 years, but there have been plenty of bad CD-Rs that have become unreadable after less than 10 years. I had several hundred CD-Rs. Most of them were OK, especially the gold archival CD-Rs from Kodak, so I have migrated the data from them mostly to save space and improve access speed, not for them being too old. Nevertheless there have been a few that have gone bad, but I had duplicates for all of them, so I did not lose the data. Had I not been cautious, I would have lost some of the data. The main problem of optical discs is their much too low capacity in comparison with magnetic media. A small suitcase with tape cartridges contains as much data as a big cabinet full of the most dense optical discs.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- wolvoleo 8mo ago
  The CD-Rs had an active organic layer that oxidizes, even if the mirror is gold. Some kind of rewritables weren't organic as far as I remember. Also CD-Rs have the active layer (top) exposed to the air, but that was solved with DVDs which are a sandwich (which though caused its own issues with shearing)

kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago

> The drives are huge You can get 5.25" bay drives.

buildbot 8mo ago
I believe they are all 5.25in, some are just in a case. Even the library drives are just two 5.25 bays put together, a full height drive; vs. the much more common half height.

buckle8017 8mo ago

> The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes). Sure but old drives are widely available at low prices.

buildbot 8mo ago
This is true - I got a fiber channel LTO-8 FH drive off ebay brand new in the IBM packaging for less than 750$ Tapes are 60; so breaking even against 15$ per TB HDDs is pretty fast.
AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
No, they are not. Specially when you have to find the one drive that will read your tapes , connect to your computer, and many other constraints that a user will have.
- adrian_b 8mo ago
  The connection to a computer does not have any special challenges, except that the computer must be a desktop with a free PCIe slot. Unless you have a server motherboard with an on-board SAS controller, you need to buy a SAS HBA card, put it in your desktop and also buy a compatible SAS cable, in order to connect an LTO tape drive to the computer. New tape drives are extremely expensive, e.g. $4500 for the last generation of LTO-9 tapes (18 TB/cartridge), but if you store at least a few hundred TB of data you recover the cost of the drive from the cost difference between HDDs and tape cartridges. I have an older LTO-7 (6 TB/cartridge) tabletop drive, which has cost me $3000 about 7 or 8 years ago (new), and there are several years since I have recovered its cost. If you do not intend to store more than 100 TB, the cheapest solution is to buy external HDDs, but for long term storage you must plan to migrate the data periodically, as the lifetime of HDDs is hard to predict and unlikely to be much greater than 5 years.
- buckle8017 8mo ago
  I was genuinely confused by your comment so I went looking on ebay. Why are they so expensive now? they used to be dirt cheap

buildbot 8mo ago

You can still buy brand new LTO-4 and up from a brief search - I think due to the enterprise use cases it’ll hang around longer than any other format. Tape existed before the HDD; it’ll be there watching HDDS pass away into the ether too. Probably a few tape drives on the Starship Enterprise somewhere. More seriously; you can buy used lto-7/8 for very little these days, and the tapes are extremely cheap per gb. The drives are somewhat loud; it’s not a beside device for sure. I’m finding it a bit of a pain to manage a good backup strategy with them.

GTP 8mo ago
AFAIK the tapes are cheap, but tape libs aren't. Considering that they also take up a significant amount of space, I personally don't see them as a viable backup medium for most private users.
- protimewaster 8mo ago
  You don't necessarily need a lib, though. Especially if you're interested in a use case where you can store data in a go bag, safe deposit box, etc., it seems like having individual tapes would be preferable. Individual used drives aren't too expensive (or at least didn't used to be). Libraries, in contrast, do tend to be more expensive (and also a lot more trouble to ship).
AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
You put exactly why I said do not mention LTO - You suggest buying multidecade old drives that are no longer manufactured, have weird interfaces that your 2026 PC no longer has, are expensive, large, noisy - You then mention LTO7 which will not read your LTO4 tapes and is not just expensive but literally out of reach economically for single home Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes). Or you have so much data to backup that cost of drives is not really an issue.
- 8mo ago

adrian_b 8mo ago

New drives must read and write the previous generation of tapes and they must read the tape generation that was before the previous.

AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
Which is disgrace when you consider that no optical drive is yet available that will not read original red book cd roms from the 80s. You say "it can read from one generation ago" as if it was some great thing about LTO when it is just a laughably fast obsolescence policy and what really kills it for a home user. A blueray drive manufactured today can still fscking write to a 90s CD-R from way before LTO even existed.
- adrian_b 8mo ago
  That is easy for optical drives, because there is no direct relationship between the size of bits on the optical track and the dimensions of the read/write laser head. For magnetic media, the gaps in the magnetic circuit of the read/write heads are optimized for a certain dimension of the bits from the tape material and the efficiency of the read/write process greatly diminishes for other bit sizes. So there is no obsolescence policy, but there is a real technical difficulty in ensuring compatibility with older magnetic media with different bit densities.
  - AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
    That is not that simple. There is a relationship between laser and media, most optical drives to this day have entirely separate lasers for different generations of media. At the very least, red vs blue lasers. It is not as simple as claiming that optical drives have it easier technologically. If anything, I would claim that tapes have it simpler, definitely for reading at least. There is _nothing_ preventing LTO from retrocompatibility other than market forces.
Dylan16807 8mo ago
That's not true anymore.

aidenn0 8mo ago

> Please do not say LTO tapes. Literally every single reply to this comment mentions LTO; never change HN.

Spooky23 8mo ago
HN is full of people who backup but never restore. Lol
AshamedCaptain 8mo ago
I specifically said do not mention LTO because I knew it would happen. LTO-advocates fail to see how pointless LTO is for someone who is well-served by a backup/archival strategy that uses optical media. When I say "I'm concerned about whether I could buy newly manufactured drives and media in 10,20 years", the answer cannot possibly be "LTO". Because in order for LTO to make any economical sense, I would have to buy ancient LTO drives, and ancient LTO media compatible with those drives, and ancient computers compatible with the interfaces used by those drives. Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then? Compare this to BD where in at least today you can buy a simple and cheap USB drive and new media, all of them manufactured today, and not break the bank while doing so. And drives have evolved from $propietary->PATA->SATA->USB, keeping up with the times and interfaces. (Interestingly, I can also buy newly manufactured USB 3.5inch floppy drives. But not media.) I mean, certainly LTO has its advantages, but in the same way that someone requiring to archive 8TB of data would likely screech if asked to do so with BD media, it just doesn't make sense to suggest LTO as a long-term alternative here.
- buildbot 8mo ago
  Really the one thing that's guaranteed to be manufactured in N years is _some kind of storage_. I wouldn't buy LTO-1 now, but later gens are going to be around for some time, just like CD-ROMs and other optical media, in some form. And readers will always exist barring an asteroid impact or whatever. >Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then? You can still buy brand new LTO-1 media from 2000 - 26 years old. You shouldn't, but you can. https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_183800_p/183800.html https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_1... Then here's a cheap drive https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408 https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408 So if you needed to restore a backup from 26 years ago, it would not cost you very much.

surfaceofthesun 8mo ago

I’m in a similar boat. The USB to SATA adapter has kept my 5.25” drive going for quite a few years. Some of my discs are hitting a decade and I am about to create a new set of backups. The market is smaller but the portable blu ray drives are becoming the default now. So far I’ve just kept extra discs on hand plus a backup portable drive. Hopefully blu ray discs will manage to stick around as long as writable dvds.