Backing up TB's worth of data

BluD said:
Thats a hell of a bargain, you lucked out there :)
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I thought for £25 it was worth the risk.

PiKe said:
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.

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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.
 
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I do have a Plex server with a heck of a lot of media, I can't really bring myself to use hard drives as a backup because I could be using that space for Plex instead!
 
I got myself an old LTO1 drive but my journey to tape storage hasn't been quite as smooth sailing thanks to the wonderful world of SCSI controllers. I have two controller cards yet somehow both are dead or have died in the process. The Adaptec 2120S card I have was working at one point but now that I actually need to use it I get a nice Code 10 driver error and now the system won't even boot with it inserted. Maybe I should just stick with blu-ray. :p
 
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?

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paradigm said:
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.
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That's changing very rapidly though. I work with a number of very large companies who have ditched the tape environment because it's still costly, it's slow, and it's a nightmare to keep cycling and storing tapes.

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).
 
Semple said:
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).
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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.
 
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Phil2008 said:
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.
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My slow comment was more how it was used in a business environment, disk based solutions will have many disks to land data on. Our new data protection appliance is capable of speeds upto 288TB/hr, from what i can see with LTO7, it'll struggle to peak over 1TB/hr. Hence more moving away from tape based solutions.
 
Semple said:
My slow comment was more how it was used in a business environment, disk based solutions will have many disks to land data on. Our new data protection appliance is capable of speeds upto 288TB/hr, from what i can see with LTO7, it'll struggle to peak over 1TB/hr. Hence more moving away from tape based solutions.
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Didnt know there were systems capable of transferring data at those speeds, pretty impressive that.
My LTO4 will backup 400gb in just over 2hrs, so yeah quite slow in compresent, but the hard drive could be holding it back a bit as its a WD Green and its encrypted.

Skiddley said:
I'm bidding on some LT04 gear as a tester. I've got 60TB and just looking fora DR option if the house is looted, or burns down.
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Wow 60TB impressive, thats going to take a few days to backup and a good few tapes with LTO4. You might be able to get a good deal on the tapes though from ebay, if you buy them in bulk.. The going rate is about £40-50 for a 5pack of RW 400GB tapes, (you can fit 377gb on 1 tape if the data is cant be compressed) cheaper if they are used though.
 
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Just a quick update guys.. So yeah the buying of the hardware and getting enough tapes to backup my media drive at the beginning has costed me about £150.... But now I am running a backup every few months just adding the new vids onto the last tape. Then when that is full, I'll buy another tape for £10-15 and carry on.. Im guessing a tape will take me about 8-12 months to fill up, so I dont think thats too bad spending £10-15 every 8-12 months to keep my media drive backed up, do you?
 
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well I am on my 9th 400gb tape and thats just under 4tb of backing up... But its not too bad as 1 400gb tape lasts me 1-2yrs before I fill it up and a tape is about £10-15, cheaper if you get them in bulk tho

I wouldnt like to restore them all if my drive failed, as it would take me a whole day or longer to restore the 9tapes. But at least I wont be crying if the drive did fail on me.
 
I’ve got 2x 2Tb and 2x 4Tb drives in my NAS. I couldn’t decide how best to backup everything, but I eventually bought a 12Tb drive and a USB3 enclosure. I’ve configured my NAS to do an incremental backup every time I plug the external drive into the USB socket at the front of it. Seems to work well, transfers just above 100Mb/sec; I just have to remember to backup every month or so. None of my data is that critical however...
 
Backing stuff to tape is good, saves money in the long run and safer then backing up onto hard drives, but backing to tape is a bit of a faff if you want files updating... For me its ideal as I am only backing up video files and not updating any previous files... I update my vid library on to tape every month or so.
 
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hi guys, just a update.... Yesterday in the process of doing a fresh reinstall of windows I had a virus and it killed windows, luckily I backed windows up a few hrs before, during the reinstalling of windows so that was ok. The virus had taken out quite a few files on my storage drive, but none that was important and about a quarter to half of files on my media drive.

Im just in the process of restoring the media files from the LTO tapes and so far ok... I would have been crying now if it had happened this time last year as my media drive wasn't backed up at all. So thank god that I bought the tape drive and bought it at a steal price, or I really wouldn't have known what todo, I think I would have gone to bed and wouldn't of wanted to wake up again. But as it goes Im not all that bothered....... So guys backup,Backup, BACKUP, it will save you a lot of heartache, as its not only drive failures you have to wrorry about..
 
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Just finished restoring my media videos, and with this being the first time I have used the tape drive for restoring my data, I was a bit unsure that it was going todo it properly. But no errors or anything at all, its done it perfectly. Plus it had to search for files on the tapes aswel, so not a straight forward task.

So yes Im really pleased with the tape drive, its all worked as it should and its been a life saver..... A hard drive as a backup for my media would have been a bit quicker at restoring the data(less time searching for files and the inserting of the tapes) but more expensive,, as the tape drive only costed me £25 and about £60 for the 9tapes I have used so far to backup 3.5tb of data on. Plus tapes for storing data on are much safer then hard drives, if you intend of having 1 copy of your data backed up.
 
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