Lots of people here focusing on the cost of the drive without factoring in:
- For home use, it is likely a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime purchase (try saying that about any other kind of media)
- You don't have to buy a brand new drive of the latest generation at sticker price; used last gen(s) gear from the enterprise works just as well.
- Perhaps most importantly, what's your data worth?
I don't know about you guys, but I've got photos and documents that are irreplaceable.
Tapes beat all other storage media on $/GB, reliability over time, and arguably durability, all of which are the most important factors for offline backup.
$500 comes out in the wash over a decade or two. That's the kind of time scales we're talking about. Yes, it's not cheap and easy consumer electronics you can buy off the shelf at Walmart, but it's not unreasonable either.
Can you recommend specific tape drives and/or generations? I have never considered it but you make a good point. Maybe this is the time create a backup of my irreplaceable Google photos collection.
Really, it comes down to your budget. LTO drives don't do anything interestingly different across manufacturers, and I've seen no evidence of significant reliability differences either. So, just buy the biggest generation that makes sense for your data storage needs.
Two important things to note:
1. LTO5 and onwards have a feature called LTFS, which allows you to address the tape as an ordinary file system. Before that, you were limited to purpose-built tape tools.
2. Generally, tapes can be read in drives 2 generations newer, and written in drives 1 generation newer. This rule was broken with LTO8, due to new tape composition. Starting here, it's 1 generation newer read/write.
For "purpose built tape tools", tar and dd are fine. tar is a bit easier to restore. If you are running Windows, well, don't run Windows as Microsoft have removed all the built-in tape stuff they used to supply with Windows Server and all the alternatives either cost money or are hideously complicated.
Debian + old HPE server + tape drive + tar. Job done.
That's hilarious. I did buy a tape drive. Heck, I bought a tape library. Guess what? It's useless today because my data consumption has scaled with technology and that old DAT based solution just can't cut it. Any tape drive bought today will be garbage in N years. Just a simple fact.
With all due respect, your data usage needs are yours and can't extrapolate to everyone else's. A few 320GB DAT cartridges may be enough to back up the essentials.
- For home use, it is likely a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime purchase (try saying that about any other kind of media)
- You don't have to buy a brand new drive of the latest generation at sticker price; used last gen(s) gear from the enterprise works just as well.
- Perhaps most importantly, what's your data worth? I don't know about you guys, but I've got photos and documents that are irreplaceable.
Tapes beat all other storage media on $/GB, reliability over time, and arguably durability, all of which are the most important factors for offline backup.
$500 comes out in the wash over a decade or two. That's the kind of time scales we're talking about. Yes, it's not cheap and easy consumer electronics you can buy off the shelf at Walmart, but it's not unreasonable either.