Backing up TB's worth of data

[Phil2008]

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?

 

[Phil2008]

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

 

[Phil2008]

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

 

[Phil2008]

Thought the cheapest option for storage for us consumers was the HDD, it'll be interesting how this turns out!

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.

 

[Phil2008]

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.

 

[Phil2008]

Cloud backup would seem a better option to me.

Cloud backup when you have 3tb+ of data and a 0.7mb upload speed!!!

You could use compression software on say a 12TB drive could get 4TB down to 3TB or less

Do video files compress well?

More drives

Like I say, it gets expensive when your dealing in terabytes of data

 

[Phil2008]

0.7mb? ouch

Yeah terrible, still using ADSL here

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.

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?

 

[Phil2008]

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.

 

[Phil2008]

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. 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

 

[Phil2008]

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.

 

[Phil2008]

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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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

 

[Phil2008]

Thats a hell of a bargain, you lucked out there

I thought for £25 it was worth the risk.

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.

I haven't tried restoring individual files with mine, but after its done backing up 400gb worth of data to a tape, it only takes about 10-15secs to rewind the tape back to the beginning... I would say mine would take about 10hrs or so to restore 4tb of data, but a hard drive would take that amount of time too.

But tape drives are great for backing up huge amounts of data and knowing that your data is always safe, unlike with the hard drive, you could have a hard drive fail anytime and specifically if you have only 1 backup of it... I have 2 backups of my other important stuff but thats only a few 100gb, but when you backing up TB's worth of data, multiple backups get expensive.

Ah yeah I didn't have any trouble getting the drive running with windows 10 to my amazement. I just used the win7 drivers to get the SCSSI card working and then win10 detected the drive on its own. Then I just needed to install tape backing up software as the drive didnt show up in explorer.

 

[Phil2008]

I bought a 2nd hand Adaptec 29320 Ultra320 pciex1 scsi card when I bought the LTO3 drive, I had no idea what I was doing, so much so that the external socket was too small, but the internal socket on the card was the right fitting. So I had to buy 1 of these to convert the internal socket into a external. So far the card have been fine, touch wood and backed up about 6tb of data with it.... Wonder if I can convert either of those sockets into SAS if I upgrade the drive to LTO4 or higher, because the card works real nicely with win10 and I have only pcex1 slots?

 

[Phil2008]

Can someone point me in the direction of one of these super-cheap, working LT04 drives. I'm not seeing them.

Second hand LTO4 drives are quite expensive, thats why I have gone for LTO3.

 

[Phil2008]

For a small home environment, it's a good cheap option, although as the OP has found out, it'll take a while to offload all that data, and even longer if he needs to perform a restore.

For a meagre 3Tb of data, assuming you have a reasonable upload speed, there are some cloud solutions out there that would cost similar in price short term (who knows what cloud pricing will do long term).

There not slow at all, no slower then a hard drive anyway. They just seem slow if you have a huge amount of data to backup. Mine whizzes through 700mb media files within a few seconds, about 80mb/s. It depends on how fast the data can be sent to the drive.

I have found out quite a bit about tape backup on the net and its only really big companies that use this way of backing up, because your looking at anything from £500 to a few grand for a new tape drive(no idea why they are so expensive but there you go), so I cant see many home users going down the tape road for backing up. But the companies are moving away from tape and going to the cloud instead for backing up.

So tape for backing up isn't very popular, less so now because you have the cloud for backing up too. But tape backup is still is in demand because LTO is being improved yearly, as the storage is getting larger and faster on these things. With the LTO7 drive thats been released this year you can fit, I think its 12tb of data now onto 1 tape. But your looking at mega money for LTO7.

Tape for me to backup my media drive sounded appealing because backing up terrabytes of data on to a hard drive or multiple drives, (so you have more then 1 copy) is rather expensive, plus buying a half decent £100+ hdd just for backing up on,, well its just a waste and thats the main reason I have never backed up my media drive before now......

So I will have to see how the tape goes, hopefully its as reliable and robust as people say it is, because I have only made 1 copy of the drive.