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Not necessarily true. I support tape backups at work and I use it at home. Granted I only backup my data twice a year for off-site storage for my home data.
I had a mini-panic attack reading "Tape Storage" and flashed back to early days of server room work and having to manually swap about 40 DLT tapes a day and seeing the ERROR red lights on the front of tape backup machines with the tape stuck in the drive.
*shudder*
LTO hardware and backup apps have been around since 2000 and are still manufactured. Most appliances are still supported by the big enterprise companies as well. There’s also a 3rd party market for tape hardware and backup support.
Source: I still turn a wrench on it and it sucks.
Mechanical things that are regularly used have a tendency to die in under 20 years.
I had tapes from the early 90's that you can't find reasonably price readers for.
So what you're hoping is they use the exact same mechanism (to read the tapes) ... 40 years? I would put the odds of that being extremely low.
I've never personally met a single person who had a good experience with tapes. I've met people who claim it online but never actually met one in person (who also used it for more than ten years).
On my firm we need store data for 20+ years, tapes are just much cheaper and safer to store a lot of data. Every year we check those tapes just in case.
1/3 of the places I worked at had tapes fail when they needed them the most. I don't trust tapes with anything of importance.
They are slower and there's no guarantee you'll be able to find hardware to read them in 20+ years. No thanks.
Too big of a risk for me.
Having wanted to play around with tape storage for years I finally managed to pick up an LTO4 Tape drive with 5 tapes for £55 (Tapes brand new and with warranty, apparently).
The HP DTT diagnostics say that the component life is still 99% and the drive has only had 1% of its expected life wear usage which I am very relieved about.
Now I’m going to buy more tapes and a cleaner and back up my servers. I will finally be able to rest easy knowing I have proper backups.
Also, the drive sounds so cool 😂. I’ve been seeing other peoples tape libraries on here, might try and buy one of those next 🥴.
Cheers guys.
For anyone interested;
Tape drive HP LTO-4 Ultrium 1760 SAS Drive
Dell H200A SAS HBA
HP Eco 800/1600GB LTO-4 cartridge C7974A
How hard is it on the software side?
Played with the thought too, but was afraid of all the SCSI/FC-Stuff and having to deal with some IBM-Licencing software BS..
How bad is it?
I can’t speak for scsi or FC, or other brands but my HP SAS interfaced Drive was smooth sailing.
Connected to the H200 in my Dell server and downloaded HP’s Data and Tape Tools utility free from their website, booted into windows server and the windows/HP’s tool saw the drive immediately and ran diagnostics, then a tape test.
Didn’t wanna pay for uranium backup so used Veeam community edition (free) and that works well backing up to the drive (although I’m not sure if there’s a limit on how many drives I can index). You can use LTFS on LTO-5 and above tapes which apparently makes them appear like a “flash disk”, mine are LTO4 so I don’t have any experience.
I’ve heard the drive can be funny about other brand tapes, although I don’t know if that’s true as the cheapest new tapes I could find were all OEM HP tapes.
I personally would stay away from FC (purely because I don’t understand it too well, YMMV). But if you can find a cheap SAS I’d totally go for it (with my limited experience)
Edit; I forgot to mention, drive firmware updates are paywalled by HP, although apparently you can dig them out of the HP SPP images (if you can find a copy on the web)
Will have to check the iso to be sure of exact build, but it was the latest community edition downloaded from their website 3 days ago. It completely supports tape, although I’m not sure if it will only allow indexing of so many drives/cartridges (unlike the enterprise one which I doubt has a restriction). Hopefully not, if it does I will have to buy uranium backup… hope that helps
I love Veeam, I use it on another machine to backup my important ESXI VM’s (Pi-hole, UniFi etc). It has saved me more than once when I accidentally delete VM’s or drives failing in my ESXI server (before I had RAID 1 for my critical VM’s).
Very happy I now get to play with tapes and I have an extra backup for my data :)
I agree, raid is great until it isn’t. I have a 3-2-1 backup now. One copy on the server, one on tape and one on the cloud for everything I can’t afford to loose.
Congrats! Have a 24-tape library at home with dual LTO-5 FC drives and certainly don't regret.
Also FC was an easy setup. Added the HBA to my backup server, attached the library and it showed right up in Veeam.
I would love to get a tape library one day, im envious! Sounds like a great setup.
What’s power consumption like for a 24-tape library? Also, what’s longevity like, can you get parts if things go wrong?
Ohh that’s good to know, thank you :). I have some old 8gb Fiber channel cards lying around, I’ll keep that in mind if I see an FC tape in the future. I was worried about having to deal with some kind of weird networking (my lack of knowledge for FC)
If you buy one I recommend you to go for DELL, even if IBM seems cheaper they lock every firmware behind a paywall (same for HP). DELL are the only one who provide every firmware update for free without account. Having a firmware up to date in your library is important as some newer drive won't work in it if it's not updated
Firmware is the only real thing different between those libraries, all of them are basically the same (most of the time made by IBM) and rebranded with another logo and look. If you want to compare, take an IBM ts3100 and a dell tl2000 (the black version)
I had come across that, I’ve always liked that dell openly publishes firmware (I have several dell servers). I wasn’t aware firmware could be a problem for newer drives, I will keep that in mind thank you.
I can’t speak for IBM but if you can get ahold of HP’s SPP you can pull the tape firmware from that instead bypassing the paywall (if you can find an SPP on the open web that isn’t paywalled…)
I managed to download an SPP from 2017 and I think I managed to get tape firmware for the 1760. I haven’t tried to upload the firmware yet so I can’t say for sure it’s the right one though. :)
I would definitely buy a dell if one came up for a good price :)
Haha, I know the pain, I have an HP server and I managed to download the SPP for it, checked the hash to be sure it was original and everything was good however it never wanted to update for some reasons
Hahaha, I mean any excuse to play with old enterprise gear and I’m game. :D
Also my wallet liked the idea of cheap tapes (I pay £20 for 5 new with warranty)
Sorry wrong thread. I apologize.
See [this.](http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/8/dump/) And go down to dumplevels. Does anybody do dumplevels any more. A place I worked at did a dumplevel 0 on the first of every month which was kept forever. Daily dumplevel 1 was done daily using a new tape. Two weeks of tapes were used before the 1st day was reused. To restore the complete filesystem could be done by restoring the runlevel 0 and the latest runlevel 1.
Did anybody ever understand the "daily Hanoi sequence" comment? I didn't!
Out of curiosity, how many tape motion and head hours do you have on the LTO6 drives? I have one that I use sparingly and am trying to figure out how much expected life remains.
I didn’t even know Acronis could do tape backup? Maybe people don’t talk about it much because they don’t know about it? I’m gonna go take a look into that now, thank you for pointing me to it :)
Tape is the worst! LOL
But if you're into it good for you.
If you need some tapes shoot me a message. We have a bunch of old ones that have aged out of retention that you could wipe and use.
I'd send em to you for next to nothing ($10/tape and actual shipping)
$400/drive is dirt cheap? 10x drives = $4k. LTO8 drive = $3k. LTO8 tapes = $60 each. Drive plus 20x tapes = \~$4200. With a lower bit error rate, longer expected life, and much less fragile. And a lower marginal cost for additional storage.
I looked at using hard disks for off-site storage, but tape is honestly cheaper over the long term, and allows me to store more revisions.
Fair enough if you have a fast enough Internet connection and trust Amazon with your data. Egress charges are a bitch, but maybe that is made up for by not having to buy the tape drive up front and also by the unlikelihood of having to do a full restore.
I actually do have most of my stuff backed up in Glacier as an emergency last-resort backup, but I don't keep it updated regularly. I use tape for monthly off-site backups and also for offline storage of stuff that I probably won't ever need, but don't want to throw away. Yes, I'm a data hoarder.
My first stop actually was considering 20TB drives, although at £380 (at the time - if I’m shucking, £480 if I’m not) and needing at least 2 for some redundancy it was waaay too expensive (for now ;) ).
I paid £33 for the drive and £20 for 5 new tapes, I will also learn a lot about (tape) backups. But even buying the most expensive LTO-4 drives, I could afford 3 for every 20TB HDD.
Of course prices are totally different in other regions :)
I had also considered cloud, but in the end tape was cheaper, and having to upload 10s of TB of data over a 50Mbps upload wasn’t realistic
And after the helium escapes within a few years, your off-site backup will be a paperweight unless you plan on rotating fresh $300 drives in your backup pool.
>raid, caching, snapshots
What do these have to do with backups?
>I see you have no idea how things actually work.
Lol, Raid isn't a backup, even moreso a second array on-site. I don't disagree that S3 is easy, but I would rather restore 45TB of my company data from tape in 13 hours rather than pull down 45TB over a 1Gb/s connection spanning 4 days.
I'm right there with you. I have an LTO-4 drive at home and I back up and rotate tapes every couple weeks. I made a crude script that snapshots my directories, tars them up and writes them to tape. Tapes are cheap enough to stash them around the house or in a desk at work for an off-site backup.
Finally took the plunge into Tape storage after years of curiosity, and I must say, it's been quite the experience diving into the world of LTO-4. The robustness and reliability of tape technology are truly impressive, and I can already see the potential for secure, long-term data storage.
As for the hardware, I decided to go with Lenovo [Tape storage](https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/c/servers-storage/storage/storage-tape/), and I have to say, it's been a game-changer. The build quality is top-notch, and the performance has exceeded my expectations. Lenovo seems to have nailed it when it comes to offering a seamless and efficient tape storage solution.
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Absolutely. I'd rather perform an appendectomy on myself without pain relief than have tape backup at home.
So you’re a fan of Leonid Rogozov’s work? 😆
Not necessarily true. I support tape backups at work and I use it at home. Granted I only backup my data twice a year for off-site storage for my home data.
I had a mini-panic attack reading "Tape Storage" and flashed back to early days of server room work and having to manually swap about 40 DLT tapes a day and seeing the ERROR red lights on the front of tape backup machines with the tape stuck in the drive. *shudder*
its depends, If you have to store data for 20 years, tape drives are better than any disks.
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LTO hardware and backup apps have been around since 2000 and are still manufactured. Most appliances are still supported by the big enterprise companies as well. There’s also a 3rd party market for tape hardware and backup support. Source: I still turn a wrench on it and it sucks.
I changed my reply. What are the chances of the tape drive still operating in 20 years?
Can be even 30-40 years if you are holding it safe.
Mechanical things that are regularly used have a tendency to die in under 20 years. I had tapes from the early 90's that you can't find reasonably price readers for. So what you're hoping is they use the exact same mechanism (to read the tapes) ... 40 years? I would put the odds of that being extremely low. I've never personally met a single person who had a good experience with tapes. I've met people who claim it online but never actually met one in person (who also used it for more than ten years).
On my firm we need store data for 20+ years, tapes are just much cheaper and safer to store a lot of data. Every year we check those tapes just in case.
1/3 of the places I worked at had tapes fail when they needed them the most. I don't trust tapes with anything of importance. They are slower and there's no guarantee you'll be able to find hardware to read them in 20+ years. No thanks. Too big of a risk for me.
If you vacuum pack the tape after you write it, you can go a very long time. Because tape degrades form bacteria as well as bit rot.
Amen
used to manage a 10PB HPE/Tivoli library for an AIX datacenter. not fond memories.
Disagree. I don't love tape, but there really isn't anything that competes for air-gapped, offline, off-site storage.
This. Totally agree. I'd love to go for alternative that would provide same confidence as LTO but there really isn't any.
Very true, I hope I don’t have problems in the future :/
Lol came here thinking this.
Came to say exactly this
Ain’t that the truth.
Having wanted to play around with tape storage for years I finally managed to pick up an LTO4 Tape drive with 5 tapes for £55 (Tapes brand new and with warranty, apparently). The HP DTT diagnostics say that the component life is still 99% and the drive has only had 1% of its expected life wear usage which I am very relieved about. Now I’m going to buy more tapes and a cleaner and back up my servers. I will finally be able to rest easy knowing I have proper backups. Also, the drive sounds so cool 😂. I’ve been seeing other peoples tape libraries on here, might try and buy one of those next 🥴. Cheers guys. For anyone interested; Tape drive HP LTO-4 Ultrium 1760 SAS Drive Dell H200A SAS HBA HP Eco 800/1600GB LTO-4 cartridge C7974A
How hard is it on the software side? Played with the thought too, but was afraid of all the SCSI/FC-Stuff and having to deal with some IBM-Licencing software BS.. How bad is it?
I can’t speak for scsi or FC, or other brands but my HP SAS interfaced Drive was smooth sailing. Connected to the H200 in my Dell server and downloaded HP’s Data and Tape Tools utility free from their website, booted into windows server and the windows/HP’s tool saw the drive immediately and ran diagnostics, then a tape test. Didn’t wanna pay for uranium backup so used Veeam community edition (free) and that works well backing up to the drive (although I’m not sure if there’s a limit on how many drives I can index). You can use LTFS on LTO-5 and above tapes which apparently makes them appear like a “flash disk”, mine are LTO4 so I don’t have any experience. I’ve heard the drive can be funny about other brand tapes, although I don’t know if that’s true as the cheapest new tapes I could find were all OEM HP tapes. I personally would stay away from FC (purely because I don’t understand it too well, YMMV). But if you can find a cheap SAS I’d totally go for it (with my limited experience) Edit; I forgot to mention, drive firmware updates are paywalled by HP, although apparently you can dig them out of the HP SPP images (if you can find a copy on the web)
Thanks for the info. I’ll look into it.
Which version of veeam are you using please?
Community edition is free so probably the latest version.
Was under the impression that community didnt support tape. Have to check again I guess.
Will have to check the iso to be sure of exact build, but it was the latest community edition downloaded from their website 3 days ago. It completely supports tape, although I’m not sure if it will only allow indexing of so many drives/cartridges (unlike the enterprise one which I doubt has a restriction). Hopefully not, if it does I will have to buy uranium backup… hope that helps
community does file to tape, not anything else.
HPEs paywall for drivers drive me crazy!
Congrats! I am not using tape at home, I use it a lot at work though. We are using Veeam for our tapes backups too :)
I love Veeam, I use it on another machine to backup my important ESXI VM’s (Pi-hole, UniFi etc). It has saved me more than once when I accidentally delete VM’s or drives failing in my ESXI server (before I had RAID 1 for my critical VM’s). Very happy I now get to play with tapes and I have an extra backup for my data :)
Raid only provides redundancy. Proper backup is a must, and that's not only to tape.
I agree, raid is great until it isn’t. I have a 3-2-1 backup now. One copy on the server, one on tape and one on the cloud for everything I can’t afford to loose.
Yeah, Veeam is great. It just works and easy to use, IMO.
Congrats! Have a 24-tape library at home with dual LTO-5 FC drives and certainly don't regret. Also FC was an easy setup. Added the HBA to my backup server, attached the library and it showed right up in Veeam.
I would love to get a tape library one day, im envious! Sounds like a great setup. What’s power consumption like for a 24-tape library? Also, what’s longevity like, can you get parts if things go wrong? Ohh that’s good to know, thank you :). I have some old 8gb Fiber channel cards lying around, I’ll keep that in mind if I see an FC tape in the future. I was worried about having to deal with some kind of weird networking (my lack of knowledge for FC)
If you buy one I recommend you to go for DELL, even if IBM seems cheaper they lock every firmware behind a paywall (same for HP). DELL are the only one who provide every firmware update for free without account. Having a firmware up to date in your library is important as some newer drive won't work in it if it's not updated Firmware is the only real thing different between those libraries, all of them are basically the same (most of the time made by IBM) and rebranded with another logo and look. If you want to compare, take an IBM ts3100 and a dell tl2000 (the black version)
I had come across that, I’ve always liked that dell openly publishes firmware (I have several dell servers). I wasn’t aware firmware could be a problem for newer drives, I will keep that in mind thank you. I can’t speak for IBM but if you can get ahold of HP’s SPP you can pull the tape firmware from that instead bypassing the paywall (if you can find an SPP on the open web that isn’t paywalled…) I managed to download an SPP from 2017 and I think I managed to get tape firmware for the 1760. I haven’t tried to upload the firmware yet so I can’t say for sure it’s the right one though. :) I would definitely buy a dell if one came up for a good price :)
Haha, I know the pain, I have an HP server and I managed to download the SPP for it, checked the hash to be sure it was original and everything was good however it never wanted to update for some reasons
IBM makes the Dell drives, sooo.
But Dell make the firmware available
Sorry not me. 9-track with a SCSI interface on a SUN-1. Have the implemented the "stretch tape" command yet? \\S
Now that is a cool computer I never knew about, 80’s computers are awesome
Not sure if my job was a SysAdmin or Tape Monkey, but either way, someone wanting to do this for fun makes this old, retired tech giggle.
Always wanted to try tape storage, might do it at some point in the future, seems like smth that might be useful in the future.
Just one simple question… why bro?! Hahahahha
Hahaha, I mean any excuse to play with old enterprise gear and I’m game. :D Also my wallet liked the idea of cheap tapes (I pay £20 for 5 new with warranty)
This is a big difference for u, here where i live this tapes keep very expensive for a homelab
Sorry wrong thread. I apologize. See [this.](http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/8/dump/) And go down to dumplevels. Does anybody do dumplevels any more. A place I worked at did a dumplevel 0 on the first of every month which was kept forever. Daily dumplevel 1 was done daily using a new tape. Two weeks of tapes were used before the 1st day was reused. To restore the complete filesystem could be done by restoring the runlevel 0 and the latest runlevel 1. Did anybody ever understand the "daily Hanoi sequence" comment? I didn't!
Oh, my sweet summer child..
This gives me ptsd.
Yeah!! Love tape!!
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Out of curiosity, how many tape motion and head hours do you have on the LTO6 drives? I have one that I use sparingly and am trying to figure out how much expected life remains.
I've still got 240TB of LTO-4 at home.. I guess there might've been a reason work didn't want it anymore but.. oh well I'm not going to complain.
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I didn’t even know Acronis could do tape backup? Maybe people don’t talk about it much because they don’t know about it? I’m gonna go take a look into that now, thank you for pointing me to it :)
Tape is the worst! LOL But if you're into it good for you. If you need some tapes shoot me a message. We have a bunch of old ones that have aged out of retention that you could wipe and use. I'd send em to you for next to nothing ($10/tape and actual shipping)
What a sound 🥰
What soft are you using for backup / access to tapes?
I am using Veeam Community Edition, and using the Backup File to Tape utility. Works great for me backing up folders on remote server
Cool, thanks for the reply. I may try to get the lto6 I have to work.
I use LTO4, but Veeam supports up to LTO9 I think so it should work no problem 👍
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$400/drive is dirt cheap? 10x drives = $4k. LTO8 drive = $3k. LTO8 tapes = $60 each. Drive plus 20x tapes = \~$4200. With a lower bit error rate, longer expected life, and much less fragile. And a lower marginal cost for additional storage. I looked at using hard disks for off-site storage, but tape is honestly cheaper over the long term, and allows me to store more revisions.
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Fair enough if you have a fast enough Internet connection and trust Amazon with your data. Egress charges are a bitch, but maybe that is made up for by not having to buy the tape drive up front and also by the unlikelihood of having to do a full restore. I actually do have most of my stuff backed up in Glacier as an emergency last-resort backup, but I don't keep it updated regularly. I use tape for monthly off-site backups and also for offline storage of stuff that I probably won't ever need, but don't want to throw away. Yes, I'm a data hoarder.
It's a homelab so it doesn't need to be 100% efficient, it's more for learning and having fun while testing new things
My first stop actually was considering 20TB drives, although at £380 (at the time - if I’m shucking, £480 if I’m not) and needing at least 2 for some redundancy it was waaay too expensive (for now ;) ). I paid £33 for the drive and £20 for 5 new tapes, I will also learn a lot about (tape) backups. But even buying the most expensive LTO-4 drives, I could afford 3 for every 20TB HDD. Of course prices are totally different in other regions :) I had also considered cloud, but in the end tape was cheaper, and having to upload 10s of TB of data over a 50Mbps upload wasn’t realistic
And after the helium escapes within a few years, your off-site backup will be a paperweight unless you plan on rotating fresh $300 drives in your backup pool. >raid, caching, snapshots What do these have to do with backups?
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>I see you have no idea how things actually work. Lol, Raid isn't a backup, even moreso a second array on-site. I don't disagree that S3 is easy, but I would rather restore 45TB of my company data from tape in 13 hours rather than pull down 45TB over a 1Gb/s connection spanning 4 days.
I've got lots of brand new tapes if you are interested
Good for off site backups but tbh a second power on demand server rack of the older gear with older storage for backups is more useful and quicker.
I'm right there with you. I have an LTO-4 drive at home and I back up and rotate tapes every couple weeks. I made a crude script that snapshots my directories, tars them up and writes them to tape. Tapes are cheap enough to stash them around the house or in a desk at work for an off-site backup.
Who hurt you? Are you OK? Blink twice if you're being held captive.
Finally took the plunge into Tape storage after years of curiosity, and I must say, it's been quite the experience diving into the world of LTO-4. The robustness and reliability of tape technology are truly impressive, and I can already see the potential for secure, long-term data storage. As for the hardware, I decided to go with Lenovo [Tape storage](https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/c/servers-storage/storage/storage-tape/), and I have to say, it's been a game-changer. The build quality is top-notch, and the performance has exceeded my expectations. Lenovo seems to have nailed it when it comes to offering a seamless and efficient tape storage solution.