Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

It would be great if magnetic tape were more accessible for consumers. A while back I was reviewing local backup and storage options, and I read up a bit on it. I think it scales better when you have massive amounts of data, but the initial price is fairly steep.

At the consumer level it makes way more sense to buy HDDs. My suggestion would be to pick up something like the EasyStore 8TB external HDD [0] (on sale right now at Best Buy for $160, will probably drop again soon). You can open it up, extract the drive, and drop it into your computer if you want internal storage.

If you want to reduce the risk of data loss you can also fill one up with an encrypted snapshot of your important things and ship it to a family member. Very important if you live somewhere that's at risk of being destroyed by natural disasters.

[0] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-8tb-external-usb-3...

View on HN

I’ve been happy with M-Disk DVDs for durable, disaster-proof, write-once backups. Gets a little pricey when you start talking about TB, but for family photos and important documents it more than meets my needs.

I'm not familiar with M-Disks but I swore off optical media for long term storage around 2004 when the discs in the binder I use to carry around started turning up empty. Several of them were those Kodak Gold Archival CDRs that were supposed to last a decade but were dead inside 3 years.

Thank you, had no idea. I will consider this for photos and such.

For the majority of consumers, cloud backup makes more sense than tape backup -- few people have the discipline to stick to a safe backup regimen.

Cloud backup will never work for 8T of data :-)

With a gigabit internet connection, it would take about a day to backup 8TB. 100mbit could do it in 222 hours. At 10mbit, about 90 days.

Most non tech savvy people don't even have that much data to backup: most of their heavy stuff (music, pictures, etc), are now attached to an online service.

Plus you only do it once. Differential backup would take down the size of the next backups to a few Gb, or even Mb.

It turns out that actual throughput on nominal "gigabit" consumer ISP connections ranges from 0-95% of the branding. It is only safe to consider them as "may burst as high as 980 Mb/s" and to actually test your connections to any given destination. Oversubscription and the resulting congestion are assumed into the consumer ISP model.

Even assuming that a consumer "gigabit" connection is actually delivering that speed, you also have bottlenecks in the wire protocol (sftp or scp or https or whatever) and the storage service. It would take me longer than a day to copy 8T to the archive storage within my own data center using HSI (an ftp-like utility for accessing HPSS storage).

Last year I took a subscription to Backblaze, (incidentally) I have around 8TB of data, I have a gigabit upload (a real one), but Backblaze servers are on the other side of the planet for me. It took around 3 or 4 months to upload it all.

That's to say, there's more to it than upload speed, if Backlaze had servers in Europe I'd recommend it much more than I do.

What about another 3 or 4 months to download a restore?

The core data that I'd want to restore immediately if I lost my primary fileserver is only around 100GB or less

I have several TB's of other data (mostly photos, videos, etc) that I'm fine waiting for weeks or months for if needed, but if you're in a hurry, Backblaze will sell you a hard drive that they restore your backup to and mail it to you.

At that point, one might as well just wind it off to a hard disk in the first place, then store it offsite.

Then I'd need multiple hard drives for redundancy, and I have to bring them back and read them regularly to make sure the data is all readable. And while I have a large amount of data that I rarely touch, I have a small amount that changes frequently, so I need to include that data in my off-site backup too.

Or I could just sign up for a cloud backup service, spend a month or so uploading my initial snapshot of data, and then backups are automatic and always offsite, replicated, and scrubbed. For $10/month.

EnTouch limits me to 1tb / month on gigabit fiber

+ $400/yr for storage. A few hard drives, DVDs, and tapes are much cheaper and pretty easy (even if you have to pay $500 once to get an IT pro's help.)

HDD need regular replacements if you want them to work in 30 years. It's cheaper than 400$/year, but not as much as you might think especially if you want to ensure 3 copies of each piece of data.

Got about 25TB with crashplan so far. It is slow to upload, but I am slowly getting the 35TB and counting uploaded.

I was thinking that having a separate medium for backup might make people think about it differently.

Cloud backup eliminates local disaster data loss. Which is amazing. It also introduces counter party risk, e.g. Google style service shutdown with 30-90 days to download your data or even a Megaupload like shutdown.

Isn't that only a serious risk if you are using it as cloud storage as opposed to cloud backup? If you're using it for backup, your only risk is that you won't have a backup for some period of time during/after a shut-down, until you have uploaded your local copy to a new provider.

This HP tape drive costs $2347 and can store "up to" 3T per tape.

https://www.amazon.com/HP-LTO-5-Ultrium-External-EH958B/dp/B...

The tapes are $31 and only store 1.5 T.

https://www.amazon.com/LTO5-Ultrium-1-5TB-3TB-Case/dp/B003KR...

I can buy a 1.5T hard drive for $47.

https://www.amazon.com/Generic-1-5TB-Internal-Desktop-Drive/...

I'm not seeing the cost-effectiveness of tape.

An IBM 3592 JD Advanced Data Tape Cartridge costs a bit over $200 and has a raw (uncompressed) storage capacity of 15TB. An LTO-8 cartridge is 12TB and under $200. Meanwhile the cheapest 10TB HDD Newegg sells is $304.27.

What does the tape drive cost for it?

The internet says around 1000 dollars. I guess it only makes snese if you need to store a petabyte.

No idea. It seems to be sold under the "if you need to ask, you can't afford it" pricing model. These things are definitely not intended for home use; I don't think any tape drives being sold today are, really.

10TB is not cost effective HD size 8TB is 160

8TB harddrives don't have the long term durability of a tape. In a cold and dry room you can have your tapes sit for 3 decades and they'll work.

Harddrives usually last about 10 years without power at best before you loose significant amounts of data (you loose bits beforehand, don't worry).

> In a cold and dry room you can have your tapes sit for 3 decades and they'll work.

If you can find a working drive, and drivers, for a 30 year old tape. Look at all the problems NASA has with their old tapes. The tapes actually are fine, it's just a major effort to custom build a machine to read them.

Oh don't worry, you'll get a drive and drivers, these things are build for it and as long as not all vendors for the standard are bankcrupt, you'll get something to read the drive.

You can still obtain LTO-1 compatible drives nearly 2 decades after the standard was released.

LTO5 is out of date, the prices you're seeing reflect there being a small but consistent demand for enterprise customers needing to purchase these to read LTO5,4 and 3 tapes and to replace failed out of warranty drives .

The latest version of the LTO standard is LTO8 and drives are around $2700 http://www.backupworks.com/Quantum-LTO-8-SAS-tape-drive-TC-L...

Raw capacity of LTO-8 is 12TB at $160, which is a much better value than LTO5

Factor in that these tapes are designed to be written to and then sit on a shelf for years and that such devices are more frequently purchased by enterprises expecting a long service life out of them (say 10+ years) the prices for the complete system do tend reflect this with a higher cost to entry.

> Factor in that these tapes are designed to be written to and then sit on a shelf for years

This is important. Your $47 consumer hard drive will likely not have that longevity, nor will your home computer 10 years hence likely have the correct interface and drivers to access it.

I have some older hard disk drives, and none of my current hardware will recognize the drives, even though the interface cable fits.

Ditto for my 5.25" floppy drives.

I finally threw away my old magtapes because there is no way to read them.

I threw away my zip disks for the same reason. And my MD disks. And my old tape cartridges from the 90s - no way to read them.

My old computers I retired in perfect working order will no longer boot (probably bad capacitors, who knows).

VHS and LaserDisc players are no longer made.

The only long term solution I've found is to buy new hard disks every year and copy the data forward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com