Been meaning to get an LTO6 drive for a while now to backup my server... but the outlay is fairly expensive for home use.

Tapes are cheap and fairly robust compared to disks, but the price of tape drives is expensive Vs several large capacity hard drives.

You also need SAS or Fibr Channel connectivity to hook them up.

Also in terms of long term storage LTO drives used to have a n-2 compatability with tape generations, but latest LTO specs have thrown that out of the window (meaning latest gen drives only work with latest gen tapes).

The downside of this is if you are talking years and years of archival, your tapes may not be readable on whatever generation of drives you have at that point.

I recently obtained an LTO6 tape drive for my home lab. (600$ from fleabay)

It's an external SAS device, which will ultimately become part of the storage head's SAS chain.

LTO6 is older tech these days though, as I believe the newest is LTO10? (30tb uncompressed)

The price for the drive will make your hair fall out though.

But you at least, CAN get nice re-writable tapes in a bulkpack from amazon that are brand new, for LTO6. Last I checked, you can get a 12pack for 500$.

I havent gotten around to testing/using this drive, as I am still buying parts for the storage head.

megatron-uk wrote on Yesterday, 13:32:

Been meaning to get an LTO6 drive for a while now to backup my server... but the outlay is fairly expensive for home use. […]
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Been meaning to get an LTO6 drive for a while now to backup my server... but the outlay is fairly expensive for home use.

Tapes are cheap and fairly robust compared to disks, but the price of tape drives is expensive Vs several large capacity hard drives.

You also need SAS or Fibr Channel connectivity to hook them up.

Also in terms of long term storage LTO drives used to have a n-2 compatability with tape generations, but latest LTO specs have thrown that out of the window (meaning latest gen drives only work with latest gen tapes).

The downside of this is if you are talking years and years of archival, your tapes may not be readable on whatever generation of drives you have at that point.

I was honestly thinking about something extremely inexpensive like LTO 3 or 4 at most, and of SCSI type, since it's mounted on a do-it-all computer with all types of ports (including SCSI). In the end, as I said, the terabytes to back up are very small, and if you use incremental storage, it will be a few hundred gigabytes each year. I currently use 3TB drives that I rotate every year, but I don't feel very confident about their reliability. They could fail at different times of the year, and I'll find myself with failed drives without knowing it until the end of the year when I do my backups.

For 1.5 to 2tb uncompressed, that's LTO5 or LTO6.

Those are still going to be SAS.

Suitable HBAs are not that expensive.

wierd_w wrote on Yesterday, 14:15:

For 1.5 to 2tb uncompressed, that's LTO5 or LTO6.

Those are still going to be SAS.

Suitable HBAs are not that expensive.

It's not important to use just one cassette, and it's important not to install a SAS card just for it. These two points should be taken into consideration. I was looking for other types of opinions, such as the software you use, the ease of backup, and the actual lifespan of the cassette drive/tape mechanisms. Or is the fact that LTO4 doesn't support LTFS so important? These kinds of questions interest me more than the idea of ​​using as few cassettes as possible, which, I repeat, could be stored on multiple different cassettes without any problem.

Thanks

I'm a unix bod - so the fact I can use absolutely generic 'tar' as a universal format is a big plus to tapes. As long as the drive is detected by the host adapter and the host adapter has a working driver in the Linux kernel, then that's probably the limit of my cares in terms of software.

I just need to pick up the courage to afford the initial outlay. I'm living on borrowed time really - it's a matter of when I get data loss, not if.

The only exposure to tape in my actual work life was several decades ago, and that was still using DLT IV drives and early gen LTO.... I haven't needed to touch actual backup hardware in many, many years as other people now do it for me. I'm still shocked at how much it costs though!

Even LTO6 drives are getting old (they're all I could see myself affording - the jump even to LTO7 is fairly substantial). I'd be concerned about something as old as LTO4 or 5, especially if bought used and relied upon for backup.

That said, there's not really much of an option for a home user on a budget. Tape really doesn't fit into the 'budget' IT kit category.

Ok... if true sas hba is 'not allowed'...

There does exist some oddware.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/373371742490

(Sorry, cant find a reputable vendor)

It's a SAS to USB 'hba', that's basically just a transiever box.

It'll need lots of silly cables to attach an SFF-8088 cable to that internal drive style SAS port though, and may or may not work the way you want.

Driver support for an LTO tapedrive over USB might be problematic as well.

I agree with megatron that older drives are going to be greif, because you will have to hunt for, and pay, NOS prices for tapes, and the drives are old and maybe marginal, since they will all be used.

For the same intersection of reasons, I went with LTO6, after being priced out of LTO8 offers.

I am building a SAS diskshelf based storage array for my homelab, so SAS is not an obstacle for me.

I wish you luck, but you are asking for unicorn poop, imo.

*shrug*

I don't think we're looking at it the right way. Even LTO1 tapes are built to be reliable and last decades, but I found adequate capacity in LTO4 at a very low price. The capacity is fine for what I need. I calculated 2.8 TB of data to be backed up only once, with only small annual increments of 200-300 GB. Even LTO4 is fine for this kind of data, in terms of numbers. But I would have liked to hear other considerations, such as those from those who have used it. I can do the data and connection calculations myself using the technical specifications.

Ok.. I just hope you can find tapes to use is all.

*shrug*

So no other considerations? Just get the newest unit possible and get it SAS?? Furthermore in the spirit of Vogons using and experimenting with SCSI instead of SAS should be a plus not a minus.

For example... I saw that there are units with the same characteristics but with a normal height of 5.25 and with a reduced height (the reduced one is that of normal CD-ROMs, to be clear) does anyone know why???

No, as megatron and I both settled on, lto6 is 'sufficiently new that you can get brand new, recently manufactured tapes 'cheaply'", and also 'you wont end up selling your left kidney on the black market, but it will still be pricy, to buy the drive.'

LTO6 only comes in SAS and FibreChannel interface flavors.

LTO10 is the newest, latest, and greatest.... but you can expect to pay 5000$ or more for the drive. >.<

LTO8 would be attractive, but even used, you are looking at 2000$ on ebay for one.

For very old drives, you run the risk of 'somebody mistreated this in storage, or worked its guts out, or allowed it to get packed full of dust or debris in a disused wiring closet', because it might be 3rd or 4th hand used, not just 2nd hand used.

You also run the risk of 'no, we dont make those anymore' when you look for tapes.

I really wanted LTO8, but settled for LTO6.

I suspect megatron has done the same soulsearching looking at the same withering pricetags I have.

I just want you to have a good experience.

I used to back up my most irreplaceable/important data to LTO4 but have moved to having a replicated HA pair of Synology NAS at home, an rsynced copy of the irreplaceable stuff over to a tertiary unit, a cloud (OneDrive) sync of that unit, and Wasabi inmutable storage for my Synology Active Backup config.

The problem I had with the LTO4 setup was speed of recovery, the sheer number of tapes to manage in order to have the right amount of retention, and the worst of all, the fact that the tapes were stored on-site without any protection (no fire safe, no elemental protection, etc).

I’m far happier now I have offsite copies for disasters and HA copies for continuity/availability.

paradigital wrote on Yesterday, 19:45:

I used to back up my most irreplaceable/important data to LTO4 but have moved to having a replicated HA pair of Synology NAS at home, an rsynced copy of the irreplaceable stuff over to a tertiary unit, a cloud (OneDrive) sync of that unit, and Wasabi inmutable storage for my Synology Active Backup config.

The problem I had with the LTO4 setup was speed of recovery, the sheer number of tapes to manage in order to have the right amount of retention, and the worst of all, the fact that the tapes were stored on-site without any protection (no fire safe, no elemental protection, etc).

I’m far happier now I have offsite copies for disasters and HA copies for continuity/availability.

Okay, let's say I don't have that important data, and then the LTO would be my third backup. The data is on a Truenas file server, which is backed up to another Truenas file server. The third backup would be the idea of ​​using tapes to diversify the media. With the data I have, I wouldn't use more than 10 tapes in my entire life.

If you can be bothered with the faff AND have somewhere offsite to store the tapes, then tapes can still have a place in a backup solution, I’ve nothing against that. But if you plan on keeping them in proximity of your live data then don’t bother, spend the money on an offsite medium instead.

In that case you need to weigh up the cost of losing that data if those primary and secondary sources fail, and your (last chance) tape backup is unusable because of:

Age of drive when writing
Age of tapes in storage
Ability of an old drive to read (really) old tapes

It's entirely down to you, for the same reasons as wierd_w I came to to conclusion that I wouldn't want to go any older than LTO6 due to the age of both drive and tapes.

megatron-uk wrote on Yesterday, 20:07:

In that case you need to weigh up the cost of losing that data if those primary and secondary sources fail, and your (last chanc […]
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In that case you need to weigh up the cost of losing that data if those primary and secondary sources fail, and your (last chance) tape backup is unusable because of:

Age of drive when writing
Age of tapes in storage
Ability of an old drive to read (really) old tapes

It's entirely down to you, for the same reasons as wierd_w I came to to conclusion that I wouldn't want to go any older than LTO6 due to the age of both drive and tapes.

In 20 years, if we ever need to recover the tapes, I don't think there's much difference between LTO 4 and 6. In both cases, you'll have to go to the used market to find a 4 or 6 drive. In fact, perhaps since the 4 is so cheap, you could consider getting a few spare drives now to put in the basement to read the tapes if the main drive has problems. But I think this would be the same after many years for such old drives. Paradoxically, it will be easier to find drives in the more prosperous historical period where they were purchased and produced more; it could be the LTO 1 or 2 from what I can imagine. More than anything, I wonder if the tapes are recorded reliably in the same way with both LTO 1 and 9, or do the latter write "deeper"?

It's more things like...

'Rubber belts on capstans dont stay tight forever'

And, 'no, even premium mylar films are not 100% resistant to oxidation'

And

'Cheaping out on your backups will cost you later.'

SAS is fairly fast. Even single channel old school SAS is 6gbit/sec. More modern SAS HBAs can communicate much faster than that. (The tape drive might not be able to go that fast of course, but not being bottlenecked by the transport is very important.)

Old parallel scsi is noplace even close to that speed.

You might be spending days trying to do your backups, depending how far back in time you decide to go.

Generally speaking, you want to use as few tapes as possible, and have drives with a reasonable expectation of a good service life, that are fast enough to actually complete your backup job before the next one gets scheduled.

As for 'deeper'...

To fit more data into the same physical size tape, the data needs to be written more densely. A high auraral density like that needs a media with a higher coercivity, so that the domains on the media dont spontaneously flip.

That means you need higher energies to do the write, but also, its harder to damage the data on the tape, *because its harder to overcome the media's transition energy*.

Newer tape designs will have all the perks from that.

Writing an old tape (with a lower coercivity) with this higher energy wont be helpful, and will be bad for any data written.

Compare and contrast: old audio tapes. Types 1 through 3 are FeO based, and are brown. Types 4 and up are various flavors of Cobalt oxide or even metallic particles embedded in the mylar. They need a special tape deck to be recorded on, because of the higher coercivity. They also 'sound cleaner', because they have a better auraral density. Trying to forcibly record a type 1 cassette like a type 5 one, will produce a tape that sounds all kinds of bad.

mmmhhh ok ok i have all the info i like to have... thanks for now.