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m463

As a person instead of a company, can't you just buy a stack of hard drives instead of a stack of tapes?

Even with the inflated prices nowadays 3tb 3.5" sata drives are cheaper than 2.5tb LTO-6 tapes.

Personally I don't trust optical. I had some DVD-RW drives and many of them became unreadable after a very short time.

(I don't know what the absolute vs practicate reliability factors are for any of these)

EDIT: Hmmm... https://www.howtogeek.com/the-thousand-year-disc-that-failed...

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FWIW both CD- and DVD-RW are less reliable than the read-only counterparts. M-Disc is supposedly very good.

I have used tape (of various flavours, QIC, DAT, LTO) and DVD+R and DVD-R for decades. Bluray has been the most reliable of all of them for me overall.

Tape is amazing, and resilient, but the drives are fragile and expensive.

The sad part is that Panasonic/Sony/Pioneer have pulled out of making drives (I believe Panasonic still make some for their own vertically integrated products), which just leaves Hitachi-LG.

Blu-rays are way more durable than CDs and DVDs for some reason

The Blu-ray spec demands a better coating.

It's a design feature [0], since people got annoyed with CDs and DVDs scratching so easily.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#Hard-coating_technolog...

the problem I've have with CD-Rs and DVD-Rs has nothing to do with scratching but due to degredation of the organic dye. I think this is less of an issue with BD-Rs, but I think BD-Rs can still cheap out and use the organic dyes.

I see several used LTO-6 tape sales on Ebay, for about $13 per tape. The cheapest used SAS drive I see is about $30. I'd trust a used tape over a used hard drive every time. Tapes have a 30 year life span, I can't imagine a hard drive would come close.

I'm not sure I'd trust a used tape. They're generally only rated for a couple hundred or so writes. They'll totally sit on a shelf for 30 years, but writes tear them up.

If I write and verify the write, then that's good enough for me. I don't only buy used tapes, I have about 100 that are new/unused that my important data go to, and really important stuff goes on at least 2 tapes.

Ignoring the cost of a tape drive, tapes are cheaper per TB, yes. I wouldn’t write off used hard drives though - buying only the cheapest per TB used enterprise drives, I’ve only had a ~5% failure rate across roughly 200 drives with 2-5 years of runtime (while I’ve owned them - they usually have 4-6 years when I get them). I usually get rid of them once they hit 8-10 years of uptime (or if any get any uncorrectable sectors).

If you only need ~50TB it’s probably both cheaper and easier to just buy hard drives, even today, factoring in the cost of the tape drive. Maybe even 100TB. I’m personally backing up ~225TB off-site these days and I still find AWS S3 glacier deep archive to be cheap enough - at current prices I’ve decided the hassle of doing tape again isn’t worth my time unless I’m over 300TB.

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