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Tape drive backups (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hey folks, being the family IT man I've held onto all of my families photos/videos over the last 20 years

I've been pretty careless with the backups and I know if I don't do anything it's only a matter of time before I lose them

Although I've never used them, tape drives seem to be the best so I thought I'd ask here if anyone uses them for their homelab?

It might be overkill for a few GB of photos but I'd also use the tape drives for data hoarding purposes so it's a win win in my book

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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The lto 5 drives are around $400 on ebay and the tapes can be had for around $20 each - less if bought in bulk and each tape hold 1.5TB.

I don't find it that slow as in the event of a restore like i am doing at the moment, I can get through around 3 tapes per 24 hours.

One thing I will say is although newer LTO standards allow you to treat it like a normal drive it works better using proper software designed for the task like Iperius Backup.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If you have a bigger budget around $2k something like LTO7 with 6TB tapes would be fantastic for larger data sets.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    How much do those tapes cost if purchased in bulk? I am trying to figure out how much a petabyte storage system costs, and how much physical space this would take up, and how much electricity it would require to run. I had a lot of trouble finding this information on Google because I know so little about tape storage and don't know what all I would need. I am probably not going to actually do anything with this but I am curious because I had this idea for a product and can't get it out of my mind. The most important part (for the hardware portion) is having nearly a petabyte of physical, local storage. I am aware this would be quite expensive and relatively large, but the product would be intended for governments and companies not individuals.

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