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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

Talking about hoarding, LTO tapes are the king of cheap storage, but if you want to archive significant amounts (hundreds of TB or more), it takes a significant investment to buy a tape library with somewhat recent drive. Too bad there aren't any alternatives - or are there?

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Tapes are really crap for home use though. They're expensive, super noisy. You constantly have to change them during backing up.

What I do now is use a whole box full of older harddrives that I replaced in my NAS. And I basically use them as tapes with a change frame.

Yeah, that's why i wrote that you need a tape library so you change 8 tapes at a time. If you have LTO-7, writing 8*6TB = 48 TB before having to change tapes sounds pretty good.

How long do they last, and what will you do when they stop making tapes and equipment to read them?

I ask because I came from a generation with a lot of tapes (reels, cassettes, 8-track, Betamax, VHS, etc.). Cassettes are coming back a little, but not much. I know long-term storage still uses tapes, but I wonder for how long. What happens when we run out of the resources to make them? Is there no better and safer long-term media that is affordable? A magnetic event could wipe them all.

Tapes are still being actively developed for archiving by companies like Fuji, Sony and IBM. They’re not going away any time soon.

And if a magnetic event is strong enough to wipe all your tapes you probably have bigger problems on your hands than a fried backup.

I think you're good for 20 years or so if you store the tapes well. Pretty much all of the industry is using LTO tapes so i don't see them going away soon.

Hm yeah but those tapes, they're not really a lot cheaper than a HDD of that capacity. And a tape library is a very expensive, huge and noisy.

And as I found out the drives are tempermental. I had a tape library and eventually both drives said they'd needed cleaning, even after cleaning. When it worked it was great, though a cheap NAS with a couple of hard drives in it replaced it and was far more reliable and cheaper.

Here i'm seeing the cheapest HDD at a cost of 15€/TB and LTO-9 tape at 4.72€/TB. That's more than a 3x difference.

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