Backing up TB's worth of data

[Phil2008]

So yeah just been having a play with the tape drive and I would say if you can get a cheap second hand drive (mine was £25) and a cheap pcie scsi card, its well worth looking into one if you have loads of data you need backing up because you can get a 400gb uncompressed/800gb compressed lto3 tape for £20 or cheaper if you hunt around and the reading and writing speeds are stupidly fast too, plus they work on windows 10 to my amazement.

Most ppl think old and slow when they think tape drives but the LTO drives get faster and higher capacity tapes every year, I think the latest drives are LTO7, thats 12tb on 1 tape, with speeds of 360mb/s uncompressed and 750mb/s compressed, now thats impressive, as fast as SSD drives. But the latest and greatest drives cost thousands of £££s, but I think the lto3 drive is ok for my needs as the tapes can hold 400gb/800gb worth of data and 80mb/s data speed is fast enough for me. Its just a shame its a 12yr old drive.

 

[Phil2008]

The cleaning tape came a few days ago and that has stopped the cleaning light from flashing. I have recieved 7 tapes now costing roughly £80, but the 800gb when compressed is a bit missleading because all the tests I have done I have only been able to fit roughly 400gb on to 1 tape with all compression turned on. So Im ignoring that you can fit 800gb onto 1 tape..

So tape wise.. I need 8 tapes to backup my media drive (about 3TB), about £90 in tapes, so cheaper then buying a reliable hard drive todo the job. the downside is, I have spent roughly £60-70 on the hardware to get started, it takes just over 2hrs to fill up 1 400gb tape and I havent found any software that will let you do "Multisession Tapes", so you cant do just 1 big backup and keep inserting the tapes.

 

[Firestar_3x]

The tape can't compress an already compressed file, so the storage capacity very much depends what you are backing up.

 

[Skiddley]

Ignoring lifespan, £20 per 400GB + the cost of the tape drive itself would put this as a solution well above the cost of redundant mechanical drives (on the basis that 4TB WD Reds are ~120? - and I've used these VERY successfully for years). Is this really viable?

 

[Firestar_3x]

Ignoring lifespan, £20 per 400GB + the cost of the tape drive itself would put this as a solution well above the cost of redundant mechanical drives (on the basis that 4TB WD Reds are ~120? - and I've used these VERY successfully for years). Is this really viable?

I comment as I have about 60TB on a NAS, and am thinking about an offsite option.

I get LTO4 tapes which are 800/1.6tb for £14 each.

 

[Phil2008]

I should have gone for a LTO4 drive and tapes as I think it would have been cheaper, knowing that video files cant be compressed.

Im going to get another box of 5 tapes for £50, then I should be sorted for a few years, as I will have a few empty tapes and the tapes that Im using are rewritable so I'll re-run the backup every few months.

 

[Phil2008]

Just a update,, I have now backed up my media drive (3tb) on 8 400gb (377gb) tapes. The tapes has costed roughly £80, so its deffo cheaper then a 3-4tb hdd if you dont include the tape drive and if you buy a larger capacity drive and tapes it would work out even cheaper. But like I said backing up or restoring 3tb worth of data is a days job even if your doing it from a hard drive, but with tapes, you have to keep changing the tapes over.

 

[Skiddley]

With a hard drive as a backup medium, it would just be an automated process - zero time (to the user).

Somewhat disingeneous excluding the tape drive cost? A second hand LT04 drive is what, 3-400? That's 3 new 4TB drives, with 3-5yr warranties.

 

[Firestar_3x]

I got my external Dell LTO4 drive for £80, 800/1.6tb tapes for £11 each, £19 for a HP card with external mini sas and £9 for a cable.

 

[Phil2008]

With a hard drive as a backup medium, it would just be an automated process - zero time (to the user).

Somewhat disingeneous excluding the tape drive cost? A second hand LT04 drive is what, 3-400? That's 3 new 4TB drives, with 3-5yr warranties.

I just cannot make myself buy a half decent 4tb drive just to use as a backup drive as its such a waste. I bought my LTO3 drive for £25, it was untested but turns out tobe working perfectly. The LTO3 drives sell for £200 tested

 

[BluD]

Thats a hell of a bargain, you lucked out there

 

[paradigm]

I got my external Dell LTO4 drive for £80, 800/1.6tb tapes for £11 each, £19 for a HP card with external mini sas and £9 for a cable.

That's quite expensive (the drive), my Quantum branded external LTO4 (SAS) was £60, P212 was £14, cable I got from work, and the tapes are similar cost to yours. Could do with more tapes though.

 

[PiKe]

This was an interesting watch, tape drives are fine if the only time you need to restore is in case of total failure but if you're trying to restore individual files it will take forever as it has to spool through the tape to find them.

 

[Firestar_3x]

That's quite expensive (the drive), my Quantum branded external LTO4 (SAS) was £60, P212 was £14, cable I got from work, and the tapes are similar cost to yours. Could do with more tapes though.

Cheapest sold one i can find one Ebay is £60, which is working but in unknown condition, mine is in fully serviced and overhauled condition then parked on a shelf as a spare, for the sake of £20 i'm more than happy with that.

One problem i do have however (done no research) is the P212 card with cache installed takes ages to get past post, i'm either assuming my cache module is bust or without a battery it isn't happy?

 

[Firestar_3x]

This was an interesting watch, tape drives are fine if the only time you need to restore is in case of total failure but if you're trying to restore individual files it will take forever as it has to spool through the tape to find them.

Yes, for Linus tape is for deep storage or really old stuff, for myself tape backup is an offsite backup only, i already have a backup server with a 2nd copy of everything.

 

[brendy]

Personally I'd have gone for a second hand nas box and large drives in a mirror. Or gone through my media and binned anything not overly important.

 

[paradigm]

Cheapest sold one i can find one Ebay is £60, which is working but in unknown condition, mine is in fully serviced and overhauled condition then parked on a shelf as a spare, for the sake of £20 i'm more than happy with that.

One problem i do have however (done no research) is the P212 card with cache installed takes ages to get past post, i'm either assuming my cache module is bust or without a battery it isn't happy?

My P212 is relatively slow to post (with healthy backup battery) as is my P410 also. My Dell Perc H310 is faster to boot than both and has no backup battery.

I've got a spare sealed battery if you want to try one in yours?

Personally I'd have gone for a second hand nas box and large drives in a mirror. Or gone through my media and binned anything not overly important.

Disks are not a substitute for tape, they compliment tape, but don't replace it. I've got duplication of my spindles in my PowerVault MD3000i, but I still back up to tape.

 

[Firestar_3x]

With the cache installed it will hang for around 2mins if not more, otherwise without the tape drive is detected within 30 seconds, as you say my H200 gets past post very quickly too.

Thanks for the offer i may take you up on that in the future, at the moment the card seems fully functional i just presume slower.

 

[brendy]

Disks are not a substitute for tape, they compliment tape, but don't replace it. I've got duplication of my spindles in my PowerVault MD3000i, but I still back up to tape.

True, in a business environment. For home use and incorrect sizing it makes for ballache having to run multiple jobs that require tape switching, in this case as new as an LTO 6 or robotic library would be required to do it with least intervention.
I have maybe 1Tb of family photos, videos and ripped media, I cull it every so often to keep it at an easily manageable and cheap level. Everyone has different requirements but for that amount of data, for me, ease of backup would be king.

 

[paradigm]

I'm talking about at home! I'd not be running LTO4 and an out-of-support MD3000i at work