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Comment by UltraSane | Hacker News Reader

LTO drives are expensive but well within the means of the average programmer or sysadmin. https://www.ebay.com/itm/198052084090

Optical media is an absolutely terrible format for long term archiving.

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The older generations are pretty accessible price wise yes. They're pretty awful for home use though. Those tape drives are LOUD. Backing up my 90TB NAS takes a week. I don't want to sit in that squealing for a week in my flat. Restoring a single file is a PITA also.

I just use a box full of old harddrives now, i basically use those like tape cassettes.

> I just use a box full of old harddrives now, i basically use those like tape cassettes.

Re: hard drives – I gave up entirely on the idea of storing backups "at rest" indefinitely, and use two NASes at different sites. I only store ~50TB, and I plan to need to recover every five years (e.g. when a working computer finally gives up the ghost.) I end up replacing a HD in a ZFS pool once every two years.

Yeah I wish I could do that but I don't have the money to buy a double set of drives. I often upgrade my NAS by just swapping out a disk for a bigger one and the old one goes into the backup rotation. Right now I have 15 disks in there (and 8 in the actual NAS). Because they are of course smaller drives I need more of them to cover the content.

Buying hardware to keep 15 disks spinning is also pretty expensive :(

mDisc is an optical format designed, and tested for 100+ years of storage, can be read from a consumer dvd player and cost <$10 a disc.

LTO9 is like 45TB for <$100 (I got a bunch for €55 a piece), so 4.5TB for <$10 is being generous. And even if you didn't think they lasted 30-40 years and made copies every 3 years, it's still cheaper, not to mention you have fewer tapes to manage.

Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today, so even if there are the most tremendous gains in medical sciences I'm almost certainly not going to have one in 100+ years, so I'm not sure m disc even makes cost-sense for smaller volumes.

Maybe if you want to keep your data outside for sunshine like the author of the article, but that's not me...

> Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today

You have just stumbled on the inherent problem with any archival media.

You really think you will have a working tape drive after 40 years?

Hell, in my experience tape drives are mechanically complex and full of super thin plastic wear surfaces. Do you really expect to have a working tape drive in 10 years?

As far as I can tell there is no good way to do long term static digital archives, And in the absence of that you have to depend on dynamic archives, transfer to new media every 5 years.

I think to have realistic long term static archives the best method is to only depend on the mark 1 eyeball. find your 100 best pictures, and print them out. identify important data and print it out. Stuff you want to leave to future generations, make sure it is in a form they can read.

For LTO tapes? Yes they will be available since the format is so common.

I do think LTO is a common enough format, and explicitly designed to be backwards-compatible, that it is very likely to be around in 10 years. The companies that rely on it wouldn't invest in it if they didn't think the hardware would be available. 40 years, harder to say, but as someone who owns a fair bit of working tape equipment (cassette, VHS, DV) that is almost all 25+ years old, i wouldn't think it'd be impossible.

That said, i imagine optical drives will be much the same.

It is only backwards compatible two generations, occasionally something slips at the LTO trust (or wherever those things are designed) and you get three generations. But if I have a basement full of LTO1 tapes no currently manufactured drive will read them. I would have to buy a used drive and the drives were never really made all that well. Better than the DAT drives one company I worked for used for some of their backups. But still mechanically very complex with many many small delicate plastic parts that wear out quickly. Those DAT drives were super delicate and also suffered from the same generational problems LTO does. We had a bunch of DAT1 tapes somebody wanted data from but had no working drives to do so. All our working drives were newer DAT3 and 4

That was always the hard part to justifying tape backup. the storage is cheap. but the drives are very expensive. And never seemed to last as long as their price would warrant.

That also changed somehow... LTO-10 drives are not backward compatible and can only read/write LTO-10 media.

That is because LTO-10 had to make an incompatible change to go from 18TB to 30TB

3 years is way overkill. 10 years is more reasonable.

LTO-9 tapes are actually 18TB, but yes they are a lot cheaper than optical discs. If you can afford the drive.

LTO9 is only 18TB.

The LTO compression ratio is theoretical and most peoples data will be incompatible with native LTO compression method used.

> so even if there are the most tremendous gains in medical sciences I'm almost certainly not going to have one in 100+ years

Never say never. People of today are building "90s entertainment center" setups for nostalgia, complete with VCRs. Given how many generations of game consoles had DVD drives (or BD drives that supported DVDs) in them, I would fully expect the "retro gaming" market of 100 years from now to be offering devices that can play a DVD.

In 20 years - what is more likely for you to be able to trivially go find on Ebay for < $50 - LTO Tape Reader - Random BD/DVD Player.

Likewise for 100 years, or 200 years. etc...

ALso - Archival media that needs re-copying every 20-30 years is not Archival media by my defintion

It's still a standard ish format though and not designed from the start for archival

Apparently mini discs use a different burning method (obviously) and are very very stable.

IIRC there exist "magneto-optical" disks and drives for PCs that use a similar technology, but they were niche even when that technology was current.

I think you might have a very inflated idea of how your average programmer or sysadmin makes.

No, that’s insanity.

TBH, pursuing this type of nerdery is just wasting time to excuse not curating stuff.

All electronic media is bad for long term archiving. People who restore things for a living over a period of many years transition media regularly.

Using LTO specifically for the purpose it was designed for is the exact opposite of insanity.

This has little to do with whether you curate. That's a whole different discussion about optimizing for cost, where many many terabytes eventually make LTO become cheaper. When we're specifically looking at reliability for important files, there might only be one tape's worth of data. It's a $3000 fee to make that tape (and its backups) last a long time in storage, and having more or less data barely affects the price.

You presume the things I want to save aren't individually TiBs in size.

Anyone who has even an amateur interest in, say, making movies, probably has at least a few projects worth of 4K RAW footage they would hope outlives them. (And the average small-time YouTube content creator has far more.)

I don't know, i don't think any one after me is gonna scrounge through hours of raw footage of an old project of some grandparent (me). Not that I have kids but anyway.

If anything I doubt they'll bother looking at the final cut.

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