Slightly off topic but I used to keep tape backups.

For me it was more about the nostalgia though. I had a NT4 server that had a DDS tape drive and have fond? memories of file restores using Backup Exec or Arc Serv.
As I was only playing multiple tapes don't matter especially as backups weren't every night. Job 1 might be my apps, job 2 games, job 3 documents, each on their own tape.

Not sure how much I'd trust tapes for important backups for a home setup. I think its probably better/cheaper just to use standard hard drive that can easily be read natively by any pc in the future
but having another copy of your data isn't going to hurt and if you want to play with this technology then fair enough.

Re LTO itself, I've used various tape backups at work over the years and found LTO gave me the least trouble. Final being a tape library which finally got decommissioned 5 years ago.
My only real complaint is the size of the tape itself which is only an issue when trying to store 100's of them.

wierd_w wrote on Yesterday, 17:31:

Ok... if true sas hba is 'not allowed'... […]
Show full quote

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

There does exist some oddware.

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

...

I know there is one company makes USB LTO6 drive, maybe they uses the same chip in their external drive
https://www.unitex.co.jp/en/products/hardware … /lto-tapedrive/

sangokushi wrote on Today, 05:11:

wierd_w wrote on Yesterday, 17:31:

Ok... if true sas hba is 'not allowed'... […]
Show full quote

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

There does exist some oddware.

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

...

I know there is one company makes USB LTO6 drive, maybe they use the same chip in their external drive
https://www.unitex.co.jp/en/products/hardware … /lto-tapedrive/

I was more interested in knowing the backup methods. I understand that up to LTO4 drives, every time you do a backup, it has to rewrite all the previous data along with the new data. And that you have to have them available? This is because it doesn't support partitions, not even LTFS. Could someone who uses them explain this to me? I was simply thinking of doing incremental backups and that I only had to write the new data each time, not that I also had to have all the data written to the tapes in previous years.

It *depends* on what software you use.

In one of the teams I managed we had an LTO (5, I think?) tape library - the team used Amanda (https://www.amanda.org/) to do full-system and incremental backups of a range of systems. It was the amanda software itself which knew which tapes to use for the incrementals vs full system image.

Restoring was a case of the system prompting to insert (for example); master tape 7 and incremental tapes 23, 24 and 25... of course being an auto loader you didn't usually need to actually insert any tapes unless we wanted to go back any further than the time the tapes were cycled to offsite storage.

In this case, it was the Amanda software itself which kept a local db of what was were on which tapes.

LTFS effectively treats the linear tape as (slow) hard drive, and you can read and write to it on individual files. You don't *have* to use it like that.