Hacker News Reader

Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

You put exactly why I said do not mention LTO

- You suggest buying multidecade old drives that are no longer manufactured, have weird interfaces that your 2026 PC no longer has, are expensive, large, noisy

- You then mention LTO7 which will not read your LTO4 tapes and is not just expensive but literally out of reach economically for single home

Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes). Or you have so much data to backup that cost of drives is not really an issue.

View on HN

Using HDDs for backup is also a terrible long term strategy, because you must have a lot of money regularly, to buy new HDDs to replace your old HDDs and this much more often than you need to buy a tape drive to migrate your tapes.

I have stored a lot of data on HDDs, and the only reason why I have not lost any of it yet is because I have always used duplicate HDDs. After 5 years or more, most HDDs had some corrupted sectors, but they were not in the same positions in the duplicate HDDs, allowing complete recovery of the data.

The reality is that both tapes and HDDs suck. What is really needed for long-term storage is a write-once memory with a lifetime of 100 years or more, based on an open standard that would ensure the availability of readers in the future.

If such a memory would use optical reading, it would have to use a great number of layers, filling a 3D volume, in order to achieve densities comparable with the magnetic media. While several research projects in this direction have been announced from time to time, until now none of them has resulted in a commercial product.

HDD cost small dollars and low skill.

Expecting even a nerdy user to successfully restore something from a cobbled together LTO setup is prepper nonsense.

I'm confused - I and many others basically have these cobbled together LTO setups. I'm only "Prepping" by finally moving some of my backups away from home, so in case of a fire or whatever I'm not out of luck. You could cobble one together now for anything from OG DAT tape to LTO-10 for ~10K, if you need. So big fire happens, you file an insurance claim, and as part of the payout buy whatever setup you need, or hire some specialists. Once we are at LTO-20, there's no reason to assume LTO-10 and older drives are totally gone from the used market?

I'm not preparing for some asteroid impact level event, in that case the loss of my backups will presumably not really matter all that much.

That’s babble to 80% of the nerdy HN audience. “Copy your stuff to this usb drive and keep it somewhere you aren’t” is easy for almost anyone to comprehend, accessible but operationally difficult.

> That’s babble to 80% of the nerdy HN audience.

Maybe you're having issues with their writing style or something but the tech is simple. They copy their stuff to a tape and keep it somewhere they aren't. If a disaster happens they'll buy a new tape drive.

Nothing weird. No "prepper nonsense".

Won't they just get binned by a future generation anyway, like Aunt Shirley's carefully-preserved collection of 35mm film negatives?

HDD cost small dollars only for small amounts of archived data, i.e. up to 100 TB or 200 TB at most.

For greater amounts of data, HDDs become too expensive and this is the main reason to switch to tapes.

Obviously, for someone who is certain of never needing more than a few tens of TB of storage space it would be foolish to use LTO.

On the other hand, for someone storing 500 TB, it is foolish to use HDDs, because tapes are more reliable, more compact, faster for sequential transfers, i.e. the actual backup and restoring, and cheaper.

It is as simple as that. The decision of using HDDs or LTO is strictly determined by the amount of data that must be stored.

The argument that HDDs should be fine for most non-technical people is correct only because those people do not store much data.

99.9% of home users looking for long term backup solutions have less than 100TB of data.

I bought a thunderbolt to FC adapter; works perfectly on Mac and Linux.

I mention LTO 4 because you can today, buy multi decades old LTO-4. Brand new. So in multiple decades from now, I assume you’ll be able to find LTO-7 or 8; brand new. A drive might cost a little more to obtain, but given the plethora of used multi decades old lto currently out there, it seems reasonable to expect that in a recovery scenario you’ll be able to shell out for the right drive.

But yes for most HDDs or the cloud are better. No need to get spicy about it.

I'm not going to actually suggest LTO-7, but what do you think is a reasonable per-month cost for backing up your important data? If it's in the $5-$10 range then you can afford a $600 drive and some tapes.

> Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes).

"regularly" can be 10 years. Your new equipment doesn't need to read your old tapes. If you advance by 4 generations, you can buy 1 new tape to replace 10 old tapes. And the newer generations have abandoned that feature anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com