Backing up TB's worth of data

Phil2008

Phil2008

Phil2008

Soldato
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17 Dec 2004
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I have a 4tb drive for my media and I have used about 3tb up so far, but its not backed up.So Im wondering whats the cheapest way to continuously back up this data. I have come across LTO backup, the discs are real cheap but the drives costs a small fortune to buy, and hdd backup would be quite costly as I get larger hdds every 4-5 years as I fill them up, and I prefer accessing the data from 1 drive instead of multiple drives. So I would need to buy 2 hdds instead of 1 everytime I wanted more space, 1 for the backup

So whats the best and cheapest way to backup TB's worth of data?
 
Dont know if I have done the right or a wrong thing guys... Just bought a used "HP StorageWorks Ultrium 960 LTO3 Tape Drive" and a "Adaptec 29320LPE Ultra320 SCSI PCIe Card", and Im just hoping I can get them working it win7 or 10. Then I just need to buy some 800gb tapes and fingers crossed that will work to backup my media hdd
 
Yeah apparently they are real reliable and you get a lot more GB's for your money. The max cassette the drive can take is 800gb, and the cassettes cost about £20. So it will cost about £80 to backup 4tb and I should be able to reuse the cassettes, That if I can get everything working:eek:
 
Doogles said:
Thought the cheapest option for storage for us consumers was the HDD, it'll be interesting how this turns out!
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Well Id say in about another year my 4tb drive will be full, so I'll replace that with a 8tb drive if I can afford it. I'll replace 1 of my other smaller backup drives with the 4tb.

If this goes to plan and I can get the tape drive working,,, I have thought a few times over the years to back up my media drive, but it seems such a waste spending £150+ on a huge drive just to backup on and then store it away in the cupboard, but I guess I wouldn't be thinking that if I the drive failed.. With these backup tapes, they are cheap and they are designed to be stored away, so you are not thinking "what a waste".

Anyway I'll let you know how I get on with it, if I can get it working, plus and I have bought a used 400gb(uncompressed) 800gb(compressed tape for £6.50 to practice with.
 
Interesting info about the LTO tapes and its amazing that OS dont support them anymore, or the SCSI ones anymore, You can buy USB tape drives now but cost a few thousand...........

When the subject of “optical” or “recordable media” comes up, you often hear people mention such terms as “shelf life” or “ruggedness” of the physical media (which is, in the case of optical disc, an actual DISC). When it comes to shelf life of an LTO tape, we can tell you that it’s one of the best archival choices available today mainly because of its shelf life of 30 to 50 years…coupled with a relatively low cost of ownership.
  • Hard drives last one to five years
  • DVD's last three to seven years
  • Flash drives last five to eight years
  • LTO lasts 30 to 50 years

With the current generation of LTO Ultrium, LTO-7 able to hold 6TB native and 15TB Compressed on a single cartridge. In the world of video and film production – something we know a little about – digital tape storage has become a viable and cost-effective alternative to hard drives for the long-term storage of video productions and other digital content…at least where hundreds of terabytes are concerned. The technology is stable, long-standing and doesn’t require any significant learning curve to understand or use – a win-win for business owners and film producers alike.

With hard drives becoming more expensive to purchase courtesy of the “pleasure” of having to buy more and more of them – to say nothing of their maintenance against hazards – the choice of going with digital tape or LTO has surfaced as a means for archiving video for storage, be it short or long-term. Taking all this into consideration, it’s no surprise LTO is in heavy rotation for data archiving and storage due to the inherent strengths and low cost…but it’s also being used by those producing video because the cost allows for just about anyone to create a competent backup and archiving system for their video. With improvements to the technology including LTFS – also known as “Tape NAS” which describes a hybrid fusion of the best features of LTO and the direct access search capabilities of hard drives.
 
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Dunno about the HDD lasting one to five years, I've seen plenty that have had 10 years usage daily that have no errors, although I wouldn't want to be using them. Also got DVD's from early 00's that work just fine.
 
chroniclard said:
0.7mb? ouch :p
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Yeah terrible, still using ADSL here

Doogles said:
Dunno about the HDD lasting one to five years, I've seen plenty that have had 10 years usage daily that have no errors, although I wouldn't want to be using them. Also got DVD's from early 00's that work just fine.
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Im guessing thats exstream measures, but a HDD can fail at any time, but whats the likely hood on the main HDD and backup HDD failing at the same time?

With DVD'S\Bluray I guess it all depends how well you look after them. But can you imagine backing up 3 or 4TB's on DVD or Bluray?
 
1 part seems to have gone smoothly. Installed SCSI card, used win7 64bit drivers for win10 and they have installed ok. Now waiting for the LTO drive and that should be here tomorrow. Hopefully that will work without a hitch too, but Im not normally that lucky. But my main concern was getting the SCSI card working in windows 10, the LTO drive might not need any drivers to work, or thats what the net says, but we will see.
 
Already backup my data to another server, however I wanted to store a backup "offsite", purchased an external SAS LTO-4 drive, so 800gb/1.6tb compressed per tape.

Why?

Cheap media £11 per tape, easy to transport, hard to damage, not easy for someone else to read the contents.

Works well enough and i know my data is safe should the house burn down.
 
I received all the bits yesterday, went to plug the scsi lead into the pcie card and the lead wouldn't fit the scsi port on the card as its too small:mad:. Ive been seeing if I can get a convertor but I haven't come across one, So its try again getting the correct card or giving it all up as a bad job.. dammit
 
I have just found out the scsi lead will fit to the internal socket of the card, so I am going to get a scsi backplate, so the socket will be external.. I will then have 2sizes of scsi sockets at the rear of my pc, and hopefully the drive will work, fingers crossed.
 
Finally got the tape drive connected up and windows 10 has detected it fine to my amazement. It seems to be backing up and restoring fine at about 80mb/s, but the clean heads light is flashing though, so I have ordered a cleaning tape, hopefully that will knock off the light...... The tape sound brings back good old memories of the audio cassette tape.

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