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This would make tape worthwhile again if the price is reasonable (<= 100$ cassette). Currently LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Whereas they are generally m

This would make tape worthwhile again if the price is reasonable (<= 100$ cassette). Currently LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Whereas they are generally more reliable than an hard drive, for the same investment you can just buy more drives and make up for it, and you gain improved r/w speed and _random_ access, which cannot be overstated (tape is generally a PITA to use). Not to mention that a single tape drive is only useful if you can backup your entire system with just one tape. When LTO6 came out, I already couldn't, making a tape robot necessary. Again, to make things into perspective, today you can just buy a cheap nas with 2 drives with hotplug, and you still saved 2k$ for the tape drive. With a 185TB tape you can seriously think to backup an entire site to a couple of cassettes again. IF price is reasonable.

shiftpgdn 12y ago
Just about every big organization on the face of the planet does backup to tape as part of a disaster recovery scheme. Anecdotally I currently backup about 100TB of data each month that get shipped off to a secure storage facility. I would love to be able to back up to HDDs/NAS and ship that out but the equipment cost is much higher and hard drives are not reliable for long term storage as the heads stick to the platters.
- greedo 12y ago
  Or they backup to a disk appliance that replicates deduped data across a WAN segment to a DR site...
valarauca1 12y ago
>LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Not at all. Oracle and IBM sell data insurance. If you save data on their tapes, that data will be their for 100 years, or you get a large chunk of money. This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections. Sony currently doesn't offer tape insurance. Which if they want this to succeed they likely will have too as this is the main attraction of tapes. Safe long term storage. :.:.: There are a few technical problems. The biggest problem overall is write speed. A T1000C tape drive (5TB Oracle) can take about 4 hours to "Fill". This is with 16 parallel writes (tracks) taking place. Having a flat 20x more data to write could mean times in the order of 72+ hour to preform a full back up (Assume 16 parallel writes, same speed as oracle), or LONGER! I really want to see a data sheet on this new tech not hype.
- jonknee 12y ago
  > This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections Well tape drives don't offer insurance either... As you mentioned, Oracle and IBM do. If you have the cash you can insure anything you'd like, even hard drives.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Your missing the fundamental crux of the argument. Yes you can insure a HDD. But why would you? HDD don't last 30+ years. Even if you take out a hard drive and set it on your desk, never touching it again chances are the data will be gone in 10-20 years due to bit rot (most likely at human survival-able temperatures). Tapes don't suffer from this (well they do, just at a slower rate due to larger bits).
    - jonknee 12y ago
      > HDD don't last 30+ years. Even if you take out a hard drive and set it on your desk, never touching it again chances are the data will be gone in 10-20 years due to bit rot (most likely at human survival-able temperatures). Tapes don't suffer from this (well they do, just at a slower rate due to larger bits). That sounds exactly like a situation you would want insurance... Why insure the one that never goes bad?
      - valarauca1 12y ago
        Honestly I have to ask are you a troll? You understand how insurance works right? Basically your hedging a long term bet that and event you are insuring against won't take place. Lets take life insurance for example, its very cheap on say 20 year olds, who are active, non-smokers. Because overall a 20 year old, active, non-smoker has a much lower chance of dropping dead over night then say a 80 year old active, non-smoker. Its pretty simple stats honestly. Insuring a HDD for 20+ years is the equivalent of buying a 350 year life insurance policy for a human. Statically its pretty safe to say that policy will payout. If you buy a policy that will statically pay out, it means the policy total needs to be collected before the event will likely take place, therefore result in a net profit for the provider. :.:.: Example So you take out a 30 year protection policy on a 2TB hard drive, this policy will pay 50 million dollars. 80% of Hard Drives fail in 4 years, which means as an insurer you need to collect AT LEAST 80% of the policy pay out by year 4 of the devices life cycle. This means you'll expect payments of ~1.041 million a month (at least). For the insurer to break even on your policy over an infinite amount of hard drives (which they're likely using a finite model), so a lot more. Now you take a 30 year tape drive, for 50 million dollars. 1% of drives fail after 30 years. This means you can collect the total 50 million from at least 100 different contracts, meaning within 30 years each policy will only collect ~5 millions dollars in payments (13k montly payments) The former seems completely idiotic to both the insurance agency AND the business asking for it. I don't know what your point is. :.:.: TL;DR: For insurance to work (profitably for both parties) you can't have the certainty of the event occurring within the policies term.
dragontamer 12y ago
The latest LTO-tapes always costed a ton of money. When LTO-5 were released years ago, they were also way out of price. Just stick with "one-generation behind" unless you really need the space. LTO-5 tapes are $25 for 1.5TB of data. Plenty cheap if you actually use enough tapes to make the $2000 tape-drive worth the cost.
- sireat 12y ago
  I just checked on newegg and LTO-4 drives are still over $1,000! I remember about 20 years ago, it was quite reasonable to use tapes as backup even as a consumer. If one generation behind would cost less than $500 I would think it would actually capture some of the consumer market. Otherwise consumers have cloud and BD as backup and that's it.
  - jlawer 12y ago
    The drives are expensive still, largely because the consumer level products no longer exist. Unfortunately a USB hard disk is the closest thing to backup that most consumers will touch. and for these that are serious other technologies tend to take the place.
epistasis 12y ago
> Whereas they are generally more reliable than an hard drive, for the same investment you can just buy more drives and make up for it, I would love to see how you make this miracle happen, because it would make my life easier. My numbers currently favor tape heavily. LTO-6 media is less than $25/TB, whereas spinny disks are $40/TB, and if those hard drives are going to be plugged in, add a minimum $10/TB for connecting them to something.
- tenfingers 12y ago
  LTO-4/5/6 media was always pricier for me whenever I was using it. But most importantly, a tape robot costs orders of magnitude more. And if you don't have one, you either need multiple drives or fit the whole archive into one tape. Now, if at home you can easily reach 2TB per-disk and have ~10TB easily, a nas with 8-16 disks in any work place will easily be too large for a single tape to be useful. A tape robot will be out of reach (in economical and logistical terms). In these conditions, you really need a _huge_ system to make tape economically viable, but that's a very small market, whereas buying harddrives and cycling them will be the only logical choice. Tape used to be different, where you could fit a week of incremental backups into one in the eighties. That made tape worthwhile. Then HD became more dense, while tape struggled.
  - epistasis 12y ago
    Ah, I see, thanks for the followup. I'm thinking of backing up on the order of 100TB a month, in which case a tape robot starts to make sense financially, but is a pain when it comes to software.
    - tenfingers 12y ago
      We're currently "backupping" ~300TB, and we chose delayed replication on a secondary site after evaluating several solutions. With hashbackup (http://www.hashbackup.com/ http://www.hashbackup.com/ - not related in any way, just a happy user), we can squeeze roughly one year of history using a differential daily/weekly/monthly schedule. It's faster than tape, and much easier to manage. If you account for electricity though, it's not much cheaper. But as we scale our storage, we can scale the other site as well (replacing hdds with higher capacity), which has allowed us to move from ~100TB to the current size without any change. That being said, if I had a high density tape (as advertised), I would definitely choose tape. I don't think I need to explain the benefits of having multiple copies.
derekp7 12y ago
Since the data is always sequential on a tape, read/write speed (in my experience) ends up way faster than hard drives. And average positioning time is about 50 seconds or so. The trick is to have good software that records a few gigs in each write session, and keeps a database of which file/version is in which session. Then it only takes a couple minutes to restore any particular file (average positioning time, plus average time to get to a file within a segment). One thing I've done, without special software, when I've had to archive an entire system on a tape is: 1) Use "find" to make an index of all files to backup, splitting it up in approx. 2GB segments 2) Tar each segment in a separate session 3) Create a tar at the end of the tape with the index from step 1. The first write session of the tape contains a tar file with a README describing how to get the data (seek to the end of tape, back up one session, restore the index, then use that to position the tape to the session with the desired file). Also included was the shell scripts used to create the tape, along with a script to automate restoring a given list of files.
- zurn 12y ago
  You can do the exact same thing with disks to arrange data sequentially though.
  - derekp7 12y ago
    A good way to do this is with VTL software (there's a free one for Linux), and make each external USB disk a separate virtual tape.

shiftpgdn 12y ago

Just about every big organization on the face of the planet does backup to tape as part of a disaster recovery scheme. Anecdotally I currently backup about 100TB of data each month that get shipped off to a secure storage facility. I would love to be able to back up to HDDs/NAS and ship that out but the equipment cost is much higher and hard drives are not reliable for long term storage as the heads stick to the platters.

greedo 12y ago
Or they backup to a disk appliance that replicates deduped data across a WAN segment to a DR site...

valarauca1 12y ago

>LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Not at all. Oracle and IBM sell data insurance. If you save data on their tapes, that data will be their for 100 years, or you get a large chunk of money. This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections. Sony currently doesn't offer tape insurance. Which if they want this to succeed they likely will have too as this is the main attraction of tapes. Safe long term storage. :.:.: There are a few technical problems. The biggest problem overall is write speed. A T1000C tape drive (5TB Oracle) can take about 4 hours to "Fill". This is with 16 parallel writes (tracks) taking place. Having a flat 20x more data to write could mean times in the order of 72+ hour to preform a full back up (Assume 16 parallel writes, same speed as oracle), or LONGER! I really want to see a data sheet on this new tech not hype.

jonknee 12y ago
> This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections Well tape drives don't offer insurance either... As you mentioned, Oracle and IBM do. If you have the cash you can insure anything you'd like, even hard drives.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Your missing the fundamental crux of the argument. Yes you can insure a HDD. But why would you? HDD don't last 30+ years. Even if you take out a hard drive and set it on your desk, never touching it again chances are the data will be gone in 10-20 years due to bit rot (most likely at human survival-able temperatures). Tapes don't suffer from this (well they do, just at a slower rate due to larger bits).
  - jonknee 12y ago
    > HDD don't last 30+ years. Even if you take out a hard drive and set it on your desk, never touching it again chances are the data will be gone in 10-20 years due to bit rot (most likely at human survival-able temperatures). Tapes don't suffer from this (well they do, just at a slower rate due to larger bits). That sounds exactly like a situation you would want insurance... Why insure the one that never goes bad?
    - valarauca1 12y ago
      Honestly I have to ask are you a troll? You understand how insurance works right? Basically your hedging a long term bet that and event you are insuring against won't take place. Lets take life insurance for example, its very cheap on say 20 year olds, who are active, non-smokers. Because overall a 20 year old, active, non-smoker has a much lower chance of dropping dead over night then say a 80 year old active, non-smoker. Its pretty simple stats honestly. Insuring a HDD for 20+ years is the equivalent of buying a 350 year life insurance policy for a human. Statically its pretty safe to say that policy will payout. If you buy a policy that will statically pay out, it means the policy total needs to be collected before the event will likely take place, therefore result in a net profit for the provider. :.:.: Example So you take out a 30 year protection policy on a 2TB hard drive, this policy will pay 50 million dollars. 80% of Hard Drives fail in 4 years, which means as an insurer you need to collect AT LEAST 80% of the policy pay out by year 4 of the devices life cycle. This means you'll expect payments of ~1.041 million a month (at least). For the insurer to break even on your policy over an infinite amount of hard drives (which they're likely using a finite model), so a lot more. Now you take a 30 year tape drive, for 50 million dollars. 1% of drives fail after 30 years. This means you can collect the total 50 million from at least 100 different contracts, meaning within 30 years each policy will only collect ~5 millions dollars in payments (13k montly payments) The former seems completely idiotic to both the insurance agency AND the business asking for it. I don't know what your point is. :.:.: TL;DR: For insurance to work (profitably for both parties) you can't have the certainty of the event occurring within the policies term.

dragontamer 12y ago

The latest LTO-tapes always costed a ton of money. When LTO-5 were released years ago, they were also way out of price. Just stick with "one-generation behind" unless you really need the space. LTO-5 tapes are $25 for 1.5TB of data. Plenty cheap if you actually use enough tapes to make the $2000 tape-drive worth the cost.

sireat 12y ago
I just checked on newegg and LTO-4 drives are still over $1,000! I remember about 20 years ago, it was quite reasonable to use tapes as backup even as a consumer. If one generation behind would cost less than $500 I would think it would actually capture some of the consumer market. Otherwise consumers have cloud and BD as backup and that's it.
- jlawer 12y ago
  The drives are expensive still, largely because the consumer level products no longer exist. Unfortunately a USB hard disk is the closest thing to backup that most consumers will touch. and for these that are serious other technologies tend to take the place.

epistasis 12y ago

> Whereas they are generally more reliable than an hard drive, for the same investment you can just buy more drives and make up for it, I would love to see how you make this miracle happen, because it would make my life easier. My numbers currently favor tape heavily. LTO-6 media is less than $25/TB, whereas spinny disks are $40/TB, and if those hard drives are going to be plugged in, add a minimum $10/TB for connecting them to something.

tenfingers 12y ago
LTO-4/5/6 media was always pricier for me whenever I was using it. But most importantly, a tape robot costs orders of magnitude more. And if you don't have one, you either need multiple drives or fit the whole archive into one tape. Now, if at home you can easily reach 2TB per-disk and have ~10TB easily, a nas with 8-16 disks in any work place will easily be too large for a single tape to be useful. A tape robot will be out of reach (in economical and logistical terms). In these conditions, you really need a _huge_ system to make tape economically viable, but that's a very small market, whereas buying harddrives and cycling them will be the only logical choice. Tape used to be different, where you could fit a week of incremental backups into one in the eighties. That made tape worthwhile. Then HD became more dense, while tape struggled.
- epistasis 12y ago
  Ah, I see, thanks for the followup. I'm thinking of backing up on the order of 100TB a month, in which case a tape robot starts to make sense financially, but is a pain when it comes to software.
  - tenfingers 12y ago
    We're currently "backupping" ~300TB, and we chose delayed replication on a secondary site after evaluating several solutions. With hashbackup (http://www.hashbackup.com/ http://www.hashbackup.com/ - not related in any way, just a happy user), we can squeeze roughly one year of history using a differential daily/weekly/monthly schedule. It's faster than tape, and much easier to manage. If you account for electricity though, it's not much cheaper. But as we scale our storage, we can scale the other site as well (replacing hdds with higher capacity), which has allowed us to move from ~100TB to the current size without any change. That being said, if I had a high density tape (as advertised), I would definitely choose tape. I don't think I need to explain the benefits of having multiple copies.

derekp7 12y ago

Since the data is always sequential on a tape, read/write speed (in my experience) ends up way faster than hard drives. And average positioning time is about 50 seconds or so. The trick is to have good software that records a few gigs in each write session, and keeps a database of which file/version is in which session. Then it only takes a couple minutes to restore any particular file (average positioning time, plus average time to get to a file within a segment). One thing I've done, without special software, when I've had to archive an entire system on a tape is: 1) Use "find" to make an index of all files to backup, splitting it up in approx. 2GB segments 2) Tar each segment in a separate session 3) Create a tar at the end of the tape with the index from step 1. The first write session of the tape contains a tar file with a README describing how to get the data (seek to the end of tape, back up one session, restore the index, then use that to position the tape to the session with the desired file). Also included was the shell scripts used to create the tape, along with a script to automate restoring a given list of files.

zurn 12y ago
You can do the exact same thing with disks to arrange data sequentially though.
- derekp7 12y ago
  A good way to do this is with VTL software (there's a free one for Linux), and make each external USB disk a separate virtual tape.