A cartridge capacity of a whopping 330 TB
September 1, 2018 7:32 PM Subscribe
Great article! Continually amazed by the ongoing advances in tape technology.
One thing I found slightly odd with the article was the reference to spinning platter disks - enterprises are moving to solid-state disks & flash arrays.
Often the problem with backup technologies is keeping the data in a format that can be readily retrieved (proprietary backup software, tape-libraries, compatible operating systems, interface bus technologies) - particularly if it isn't continuously online or moved from one medium to another (eg sure you've still got 20yr old DAT tapes but can you still read them?).
Related (pretty sure I saw this covered on Mefi at the time) Recovering Lost Lunar Photos from Tape
Theres another article which I couldn't find (so much for the discover-able web) relating to the idea of 'moveage' - for data to be kept alive you need to copy & replicate it. Once data stops moving forward becomes harder & harder to retrieve.
Also, Vint Cerf on Bit-Rot from 2015
posted by phigmov at 7:59 PM on September 1, 2018 [8 favorites]
One thing I found slightly odd with the article was the reference to spinning platter disks - enterprises are moving to solid-state disks & flash arrays.
Often the problem with backup technologies is keeping the data in a format that can be readily retrieved (proprietary backup software, tape-libraries, compatible operating systems, interface bus technologies) - particularly if it isn't continuously online or moved from one medium to another (eg sure you've still got 20yr old DAT tapes but can you still read them?).
Related (pretty sure I saw this covered on Mefi at the time) Recovering Lost Lunar Photos from Tape
Theres another article which I couldn't find (so much for the discover-able web) relating to the idea of 'moveage' - for data to be kept alive you need to copy & replicate it. Once data stops moving forward becomes harder & harder to retrieve.
Also, Vint Cerf on Bit-Rot from 2015
posted by phigmov at 7:59 PM on September 1, 2018 [8 favorites]
The author of this article is personally invested in tape backup systems, so take it with a grain of salt.
Remember that a backup is only as good as its restore process. I personally made a lot of money from a client who didn’t maintain a restore solution for data on DLT3 and DLT4. I’m looking forward to making more money from them when they fail to maintain a restore solution for the exact same data on LTO6 and LTO7.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:59 PM on September 1, 2018 [17 favorites]
Remember that a backup is only as good as its restore process. I personally made a lot of money from a client who didn’t maintain a restore solution for data on DLT3 and DLT4. I’m looking forward to making more money from them when they fail to maintain a restore solution for the exact same data on LTO6 and LTO7.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:59 PM on September 1, 2018 [17 favorites]
Will the future of home data storage ever be tape again? The drives are simply unaffordable, so the the low $/TB cost of the tapes doesn't matter much when you're "only" dealing with 1-10TB of personal data to back up. (but enough that online backups are infeasibly expensive too)
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 8:04 PM on September 1, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 8:04 PM on September 1, 2018 [9 favorites]
Came here to make jacquilynne's comment. *tips hat and goes back to loading station wagon*
posted by hippybear at 8:50 PM on September 1, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 8:50 PM on September 1, 2018 [5 favorites]
Thankfully there is no shortage of station wagons available for sale. We've just made them a few inches taller, a few inches shorter in length, and renamed them "crossover," though they are often mislabeled as SUVs. It's harder to find tapes and tape drives at a reasonable price, TBH.
posted by wierdo at 9:21 PM on September 1, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by wierdo at 9:21 PM on September 1, 2018 [5 favorites]
For personal use then online backup seems fine - I use crashplan which is unlimited storage for a few dollars a month. Backblaze similar and there may be others.
posted by JonB at 9:45 PM on September 1, 2018
posted by JonB at 9:45 PM on September 1, 2018
It would be cool if it were still viable to use at home, but I quit using tape when hard drives became so affordable. It seemed decadent, to use a hard drive just as a backup.
I still have a VXA drive and tapes somewhere, and I believe DDS as well.
posted by bongo_x at 9:50 PM on September 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
I still have a VXA drive and tapes somewhere, and I believe DDS as well.
posted by bongo_x at 9:50 PM on September 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
Back in the early 90s, I was doing general IT consulting, and one of the things I always asked my clients was "when was the last time you tested your (usually) tape backup recovery?" In almost every case, they had never done such a test, and when I asked them to try, they either refused (about 60%) or tried and failed (the other 40%). When they refused, I made it an official memo to my boss that we should not have any contractual obligation to be able to restore their data, and when they failed I always spent several days fixing the problems with their setup (usually bad drivers, incorrect settings, and/or using the same tape for years on end, long past its ability to record data.)
Modern setups are much more robust, and usually tested or at least run though simulations until it at least looks like they work, but I still remember those deer-in-the-headlight looks from various administrative assistants, receptionists, and secretaries whose responsibility included running those daily/weekly backups, and their nigh-fanatical insistence that since they were following the ritual, the backups were happening, no matter what the facts were. They were invariably pissed-off that I dared suggest that their backups were in fact not happening at all, and when I suggested running a recovery as a test, they treated it as a test of their faith in the system apparently handed down to them by a Higher Authority. They knew which buttons to push, which icons to click on, though no idea what was going on behind the scenes, or how to verify that the backups were happening, nor how to restore data should it become necessary.
I don't do that sort of work anymore, but I wonder how many of even the modern setups are trying to write data to a tape that is so worn it can no longer store anything, or where it is cheerfully archiving an empty filesystem, or where it was never set up to backup any data at all, just indicate via the interface that the requested backup of nothing was completed, confirmed, and verified.
posted by Blackanvil at 10:04 PM on September 1, 2018 [26 favorites]
Modern setups are much more robust, and usually tested or at least run though simulations until it at least looks like they work, but I still remember those deer-in-the-headlight looks from various administrative assistants, receptionists, and secretaries whose responsibility included running those daily/weekly backups, and their nigh-fanatical insistence that since they were following the ritual, the backups were happening, no matter what the facts were. They were invariably pissed-off that I dared suggest that their backups were in fact not happening at all, and when I suggested running a recovery as a test, they treated it as a test of their faith in the system apparently handed down to them by a Higher Authority. They knew which buttons to push, which icons to click on, though no idea what was going on behind the scenes, or how to verify that the backups were happening, nor how to restore data should it become necessary.
I don't do that sort of work anymore, but I wonder how many of even the modern setups are trying to write data to a tape that is so worn it can no longer store anything, or where it is cheerfully archiving an empty filesystem, or where it was never set up to backup any data at all, just indicate via the interface that the requested backup of nothing was completed, confirmed, and verified.
posted by Blackanvil at 10:04 PM on September 1, 2018 [26 favorites]
I'd be kind of OK with all our data being erased, and staring over
posted by thelonius at 10:54 PM on September 1, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 10:54 PM on September 1, 2018 [6 favorites]
JonB, you're using CrashPlan For Small Business, right, at $10 per month per device? Cuz CrashPlan® for Home has been sunsetting a year now and will be completely shut down on October 23, 2018. I just want to make sure you're aware and dont get caught out.
posted by glonous keming at 10:55 PM on September 1, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by glonous keming at 10:55 PM on September 1, 2018 [4 favorites]
what about vinyl?
posted by philip-random at 12:29 AM on September 2, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 12:29 AM on September 2, 2018 [7 favorites]
Will the future of home data storage ever be tape again? The drives are simply unaffordable,
New, maybe. But there are good deals to be had for second-hand LTO3 and 4 drives, where businesses have moved to LTO5 and 6. You'd probably want a refurbished, tested one from a reputable reseller, but even those can be cheap enough that they're in the same price ballpark as two or three[0] external hard disks of sufficient capacity.
[0] you do have multiple generations with at least one stored elsewhere, don't you?
posted by Stoneshop at 12:56 AM on September 2, 2018
New, maybe. But there are good deals to be had for second-hand LTO3 and 4 drives, where businesses have moved to LTO5 and 6. You'd probably want a refurbished, tested one from a reputable reseller, but even those can be cheap enough that they're in the same price ballpark as two or three[0] external hard disks of sufficient capacity.
[0] you do have multiple generations with at least one stored elsewhere, don't you?
posted by Stoneshop at 12:56 AM on September 2, 2018
Data Storage with subgroup Backup with subgroup Archive, each its own bit-rot susceptibility and recovery concerns. And which one of these images looks like it has least bit-rot mistaken for compression artifacts? We'll know in three days after we mount this spool and recover to this VM.
If only we had that much assurance.
posted by filtergik at 4:07 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
If only we had that much assurance.
posted by filtergik at 4:07 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
To put this in perspective, if this technology were to be commercialized, a movie studio, which now might need a dozen tape cartridges to archive all the digital components of a big-budget feature, wouldFixed, based on 15 years of experience in animation+VFX systems administration.be able to fit all of them on a single tapequickly figure out how to generate a dozen times as much data.
posted by clawsoon at 5:05 AM on September 2, 2018 [18 favorites]
Fixed, based on 15 years of experience in animation+VFX systems administration.
Derivative of Parkinson's Law: "Data expands to fill the space available for storage."
posted by mikelieman at 5:06 AM on September 2, 2018 [9 favorites]
Derivative of Parkinson's Law: "Data expands to fill the space available for storage."
posted by mikelieman at 5:06 AM on September 2, 2018 [9 favorites]
This brings back nightmares of my temporary lab tech job where I discovered the SCSI card for the tape backup system had the incorrect drivers installed and throughput rates resulted in the tape drive never catching up with all the scheduled backups. This had been going on for months and the people in the building had just decided that their network and internet were slow for 'reasons'.
I fixed the driver problem but the fulltime IT support people still refused to isolate the lab network..so every night I flooded the entire network with massive backups.
(They also had never tested a backup ever and their head of IT used to warn/brag to his bosses that the network would go down when he took holidays. )
posted by srboisvert at 5:13 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
I fixed the driver problem but the fulltime IT support people still refused to isolate the lab network..so every night I flooded the entire network with massive backups.
(They also had never tested a backup ever and their head of IT used to warn/brag to his bosses that the network would go down when he took holidays. )
posted by srboisvert at 5:13 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Recently saw an anecdote on reddit or HN where esuite ruled that no tapes would be reused or tossed and never tested until needed so they paid for literal a warehouse of blank backups for years.
posted by sammyo at 5:26 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by sammyo at 5:26 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Oh and if you find yourself in a restore discussion ask how long a restore takes, last relatively small one I lived through the only answer was "until it's done". Restores rebuild stuff so it can be orders of magnitude longer than saves, so I would not be surprised if 300TB took weeks if not longer.
posted by sammyo at 5:31 AM on September 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by sammyo at 5:31 AM on September 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
I am in the process of backing up a 300 tb audio and video archive, and I just bought an LTO-6 tape system. Over 80 tb or so, it starts to potentially make sense economically.
posted by umbú at 5:57 AM on September 2, 2018
posted by umbú at 5:57 AM on September 2, 2018
What could ever replace the durability of magnetic tape?
Duct tape maybe.
posted by BiggerJ at 6:19 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Duct tape maybe.
posted by BiggerJ at 6:19 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Recently saw an anecdote on reddit or HN where esuite ruled that no tapes would be reused or tossed and never tested until needed so they paid for literal a warehouse of blank backups for years.
And I thought I was OCD with my standard backup strategy.
Monday through Thursday, 2 sets A & B
Friday backups, 1, 2, 3, and 4
Month end, whatever it is, goes in the Permanent Archive.
So, when it comes time to put the pieces together, I have:
2 weeks of daily, plus 4 sets of Friday.
Plus a fire safe with month ends, going back forever.
And man, do I miss the days when I could just run lone-tar on each server to a ... geez... 120MB QIC?
posted by mikelieman at 6:20 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
And I thought I was OCD with my standard backup strategy.
Monday through Thursday, 2 sets A & B
Friday backups, 1, 2, 3, and 4
Month end, whatever it is, goes in the Permanent Archive.
So, when it comes time to put the pieces together, I have:
2 weeks of daily, plus 4 sets of Friday.
Plus a fire safe with month ends, going back forever.
And man, do I miss the days when I could just run lone-tar on each server to a ... geez... 120MB QIC?
posted by mikelieman at 6:20 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
I went pricing some used LTO-4 just for grins. I came up with $475 for the drive, $140 for ten 800GB tapes, and $35 for a SAS interface card. That's $650, or enough to buy ten 3TB hard drives (3.7× the storage) or 17 1TB hard drives (2.1× the storage). Granted, you'll also need to pick up a hot swap hard drive bay and HDD storage cases for this backup plan (please don't store bare HDDs!) but if your data storage needs are so modest they'll fit on a small number of LTO-4 tapes you probably shouldn't write off HDDs either.
It also feels like a huge advantage that HDD backups can "simply" be copies of files; you can test your back-up by making sure the file is there and has the right content.
(My personal backup system is 3 rotating 3TB drives and yes 2 of them are "offsite" (out of my house) at any time.)
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:54 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
It also feels like a huge advantage that HDD backups can "simply" be copies of files; you can test your back-up by making sure the file is there and has the right content.
(My personal backup system is 3 rotating 3TB drives and yes 2 of them are "offsite" (out of my house) at any time.)
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:54 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
if your data storage needs are so modest they'll fit on a small number of LTO-4 tapes you probably shouldn't write off HDDs either.I usually compare tape to railroads: if you have enough volume it’s hard to beat the price but if you don’t know you can’t afford anything else, you probably shouldn’t go with tape.
The overhead and operational costs are so much higher, especially now that you have a variety of online services will handle non-trivial parts of the operations and security aspects when you don’t have enough volume to amortize the staff time over.
posted by adamsc at 7:31 AM on September 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
It also feels like a huge advantage that HDD backups can "simply" be copies of files; you can test your back-up by making sure the file is there and has the right content.
My 'personal' computer is a linux box, and my backup strategy is "buy USB hd of the same capacity, and use rsync scripts to keep them in sync". Then they go sit in the back of my car. ( In reality, I have /storage/media backed up on one USB drive, and everything else on another )
I'm in the 4 - 6 TB range however, so this isn't like a "Production" level solution.
posted by mikelieman at 7:34 AM on September 2, 2018
My 'personal' computer is a linux box, and my backup strategy is "buy USB hd of the same capacity, and use rsync scripts to keep them in sync". Then they go sit in the back of my car. ( In reality, I have /storage/media backed up on one USB drive, and everything else on another )
I'm in the 4 - 6 TB range however, so this isn't like a "Production" level solution.
posted by mikelieman at 7:34 AM on September 2, 2018
FWIW, I have a CPA client who is getting ready to refresh their 2008R2 box ( with a LTO-3? ) drive and Backup Exec.
Turns out that Veritas Backup Exec will use AWS or Azure storage, and IIRC, AWS offers a "Virtual Tape Device".
When your current b/u is 250GB, this is a real option.
Strangely, I can't find a simple spreadsheet comparing the costs. But the idea of moving b/u storage from capital expense in the thousands to a recurring monthly operating expense does have some attraction. Would be a slam-dunk if I could show the CPA's a spreadsheet with even 1$ of savings....
posted by mikelieman at 7:37 AM on September 2, 2018
Turns out that Veritas Backup Exec will use AWS or Azure storage, and IIRC, AWS offers a "Virtual Tape Device".
When your current b/u is 250GB, this is a real option.
Strangely, I can't find a simple spreadsheet comparing the costs. But the idea of moving b/u storage from capital expense in the thousands to a recurring monthly operating expense does have some attraction. Would be a slam-dunk if I could show the CPA's a spreadsheet with even 1$ of savings....
posted by mikelieman at 7:37 AM on September 2, 2018
Every time I read a discussion of backup strategies it occurs to me that there still does not appear to be a backup system that is robust, inexpensive, and not a huge pain in the ass—and that there are precious few that achieve even two out of three of those criteria.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:44 AM on September 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:44 AM on September 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
there still does not appear to be a backup system that is robust, inexpensive, and not a huge pain in the ass
Ah the old scenario: "Good", "Fast", "Cheap", Pick two.
posted by mikelieman at 8:04 AM on September 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
Ah the old scenario: "Good", "Fast", "Cheap", Pick two.
posted by mikelieman at 8:04 AM on September 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
HDD backups can "simply" be copies of files; you can test your back-up by making sure the file is there and has the right content.
One of the nice things about Borg is that it comes with a FUSE filesystem driver that lets you mount any Borg archive as a read-only filesystem. Restoring or checking then works exactly as you describe.
The only real downside of basing a backup strategy on a deduplicating archiver like Borg is that bit rot in a data chunk shared by multiple archives within any given repo will break all those archives, not just one; and like any archiver that runs on top of a filesystem, bit rot within filesystem metadata can also break lots more stuff than you'd initially think possible. Layering Borg on top of a self-healing filesystem like ZFS or btrfs can mitigate that, giving you reliable point-in-time recovery capability that tape simply can't match without needing orders of magnitude more raw storage space.
posted by flabdablet at 8:04 AM on September 2, 2018
One of the nice things about Borg is that it comes with a FUSE filesystem driver that lets you mount any Borg archive as a read-only filesystem. Restoring or checking then works exactly as you describe.
The only real downside of basing a backup strategy on a deduplicating archiver like Borg is that bit rot in a data chunk shared by multiple archives within any given repo will break all those archives, not just one; and like any archiver that runs on top of a filesystem, bit rot within filesystem metadata can also break lots more stuff than you'd initially think possible. Layering Borg on top of a self-healing filesystem like ZFS or btrfs can mitigate that, giving you reliable point-in-time recovery capability that tape simply can't match without needing orders of magnitude more raw storage space.
posted by flabdablet at 8:04 AM on September 2, 2018
I spent twenty years as an archivist specializing in long-term media. Microfilm is still best and will likely be for some time, despite the withering "ha ha microfiche" humor of modern bean counters who still, long after I left the business, come crying to me for help in recovering their lost data from idiotic gee-whiz world of the future proprietary optical data systems from Wang that their salesmen talked over me to promote. As I no longer work in the biz, and love to see idiotic middle-management losers have to solve the problems they created themselves with their slavish devotion to the new, I give them the horse laugh and the offer of consulting at seven-figure rates.
The advent of open-source/joint standards tape media is the only thing that makes it even remotely possible that the entire historical record of the modern digital age will survive into the next century, and LTOs are the happy middle ground despite being a tech dependent on a lot of moving parts.
Also, the Honda Fit is clearly a station wagon, so you'll find them there.
posted by sonascope at 8:05 AM on September 2, 2018 [8 favorites]
The advent of open-source/joint standards tape media is the only thing that makes it even remotely possible that the entire historical record of the modern digital age will survive into the next century, and LTOs are the happy middle ground despite being a tech dependent on a lot of moving parts.
Also, the Honda Fit is clearly a station wagon, so you'll find them there.
posted by sonascope at 8:05 AM on September 2, 2018 [8 favorites]
the antecedent of that pronoun: Will the future of home data storage ever be tape again? The drives are simply unaffordable, so the the low $/TB cost of the tapes doesn't matter much when you're "only" dealing with 1-10TB of personal data to back up. (but enough that online backups are infeasibly expensive too)
For the average home-user you're absolutely right. But there's also a surprising and growing number of "power" home-users like myself who have in recent years entered the world of being a data-hoarder.
I outgrew 10TB about 5 years ago, when I started backing up all my DVD/BR (thank you, fair use exemption!) onto a media server shared throughout all devices in the house. Now, when you include backups of other systems, I'm getting ready to upgrade my current 64TB array (8x8TB, RAID6, ~48TB usable, ~42TB currently used) and am considering multiple possible options.
This market is only going to grow as people get used to storing mass data and as video gets higher and higher quality, and while my media server can't really use tape, the rest of my backup data absolutely could go to tape with ease (and I'm considering that as an option).
posted by mystyk at 8:05 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
For the average home-user you're absolutely right. But there's also a surprising and growing number of "power" home-users like myself who have in recent years entered the world of being a data-hoarder.
I outgrew 10TB about 5 years ago, when I started backing up all my DVD/BR (thank you, fair use exemption!) onto a media server shared throughout all devices in the house. Now, when you include backups of other systems, I'm getting ready to upgrade my current 64TB array (8x8TB, RAID6, ~48TB usable, ~42TB currently used) and am considering multiple possible options.
This market is only going to grow as people get used to storing mass data and as video gets higher and higher quality, and while my media server can't really use tape, the rest of my backup data absolutely could go to tape with ease (and I'm considering that as an option).
posted by mystyk at 8:05 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Tape is cool at scale. We had two locations with petabyte scale robot arm driven tape silos. It's really fun to watch the video feed from the robot arm. Backups were a simple mount of a NFS filesystem and incremental tar (or some sort of Solaris dump/restore thing depending on OS). Put it there and it's magically saved for like ever ish. Even the Help Desk Consultants can restore a user's deleted files. I know restore works... from that one time I flubbed a rdist config and deleted most of /var/local on scores of important machines...
Predictably, I also ended up breaking the backup system by trying to use rsnapshot (like I do at home). Backup system is tuned for few-ish large-ish files, not bazillions of small files.
The biggest problem with the online solutions is time. The bandwidth isn't there if you have large data unless you're leasing dark fiber and such. Instead you do backups to SSD/HD as a buffer and let the tape storage part take it's time.
Cue nostalgia about having skinny arms and being able to carry a couple dozen tapes at once by just shoving your arm through the hole in the middle and walking around like Popeye. I think the actual restore procedure/script hasn't changed from those days, just modified to work with new technology.
I'm pretty sure it was more like a U-Haul involved in setting up the disaster recovery site redundant tape silo.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:50 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Predictably, I also ended up breaking the backup system by trying to use rsnapshot (like I do at home). Backup system is tuned for few-ish large-ish files, not bazillions of small files.
The biggest problem with the online solutions is time. The bandwidth isn't there if you have large data unless you're leasing dark fiber and such. Instead you do backups to SSD/HD as a buffer and let the tape storage part take it's time.
Cue nostalgia about having skinny arms and being able to carry a couple dozen tapes at once by just shoving your arm through the hole in the middle and walking around like Popeye. I think the actual restore procedure/script hasn't changed from those days, just modified to work with new technology.
I'm pretty sure it was more like a U-Haul involved in setting up the disaster recovery site redundant tape silo.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:50 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Yeah, the bandwidth of 3TB hard drives taken 1 by 1 to my local bank's safe deposit box is about 10TB/hour or 22Gb/s. (It's true, I live uncommonly close to a bank with a safe deposit box!) However, once I get that drive home I can only read it at around 145MB/s or 1.16Gb/s which I guess is roughly on par with LTO-4 read speeds.
I'm lucky that unlike mystyk I haven't gotten into large scale archival of video. For a long time, digital photography was the main driver of my storage requirements, but as I've moved away from that hobby I'm accruing photos at a rate well below the peak which was about 100GB/year. (and I never shot raw or it would be quite a bit worse) And increasingly storage is dominated by things that can simply be downloaded again at any moment, e.g., that 40GB game on Steam (my backup plan doesn't cover things like the catastrophic loss of Steam)
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 9:24 AM on September 2, 2018
I'm lucky that unlike mystyk I haven't gotten into large scale archival of video. For a long time, digital photography was the main driver of my storage requirements, but as I've moved away from that hobby I'm accruing photos at a rate well below the peak which was about 100GB/year. (and I never shot raw or it would be quite a bit worse) And increasingly storage is dominated by things that can simply be downloaded again at any moment, e.g., that 40GB game on Steam (my backup plan doesn't cover things like the catastrophic loss of Steam)
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 9:24 AM on September 2, 2018
what about vinyl?
posted by philip-random
I don't trust this new tech. Give me good old wax cylinder backups any day.
posted by Splunge at 9:27 AM on September 2, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by philip-random
I don't trust this new tech. Give me good old wax cylinder backups any day.
posted by Splunge at 9:27 AM on September 2, 2018 [3 favorites]
It's been a while since I used tape, but I recall having to carefully optimize the HDD feeding the tape backup system so that it could smoothly deliver an unbroken read to tape.
posted by bz at 10:26 AM on September 2, 2018
posted by bz at 10:26 AM on September 2, 2018
mikelieman: Ah the old scenario: "Good", "Fast", "Cheap", Pick two.
If my experience with backup systems is anything to go by, it's more like "pick one".
posted by clawsoon at 11:29 AM on September 2, 2018 [11 favorites]
If my experience with backup systems is anything to go by, it's more like "pick one".
posted by clawsoon at 11:29 AM on September 2, 2018 [11 favorites]
I'm pretty happy with my online backup for personal use, but only as a worst case in case all my other backups fail. I can not even entertain for a moment the idea of relying on it as a main backup.
posted by bongo_x at 11:41 AM on September 2, 2018
posted by bongo_x at 11:41 AM on September 2, 2018
I've been pleased with IDrive (not an Apple product!) so far. They choke the upload speeds, I think, so it's probably not for users who want to upload massive amounts, but my house doesn't have huge upload bandwidth anyway. Also there's an option to send drives to be uploaded or get drives with your data if you really must.
It lets me do any number of devices, so my phone, tablet, multiple laptops and the NAS all get backed up. In fact, my main laptop gets backed up twice - I have a constant Windows file version backup to the NAS, and also a direct daily backup to IDrive. Once I've got the base data uploaded, the daily updates don't take that long. Also it lets me choose the percentage of upload capacity used, so if I have to upload a big new chunk of data that will take a long time, I simply set it to 70 or 80 percent, create a daily job, and let it keep working for however many days it takes.
posted by tavella at 11:45 AM on September 2, 2018
It lets me do any number of devices, so my phone, tablet, multiple laptops and the NAS all get backed up. In fact, my main laptop gets backed up twice - I have a constant Windows file version backup to the NAS, and also a direct daily backup to IDrive. Once I've got the base data uploaded, the daily updates don't take that long. Also it lets me choose the percentage of upload capacity used, so if I have to upload a big new chunk of data that will take a long time, I simply set it to 70 or 80 percent, create a daily job, and let it keep working for however many days it takes.
posted by tavella at 11:45 AM on September 2, 2018
I suspect that Amazon's Glacier service (long-term storage, cheap, high latency retrieval) is based on tape.
posted by clawsoon at 2:19 PM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 2:19 PM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
AWS Glacier could be very practical but understand the terms of service in detail, a full restore at the highest data rate available could be very very expensive. But it's not block storage, so for say photo backups retrieving the minimum as needed could work for some.
posted by sammyo at 5:57 PM on September 2, 2018
posted by sammyo at 5:57 PM on September 2, 2018
Backblaze will sell you a hard drive, delivered by UPS with all your data on it, if you request it, which in some cases might be faster than re-downloading it. The problem with online backups plans is that they’re all data-only, & won’t let you back up your OS & applications, so while I have peace of mind that Backblaze seems to have their shit together, I still have a couple local options - a time machine for iterative backups, & 1 internal clone of everything I can boot from immediately if a drive fails, and 2 rotating offsite clones that I don’t rotate out as often as s should, but with a house fire, I’d be maybe a month behind, but I’m back to my desktop, with all my email, app preferences, etc in just a few minutes. That’s worth a lot to me, as I have so much time invested in setting up all that stuff, & rebuilding all that with just a data-only backup is kinda too awful to contemplate.
I don’t have behemoth amounts of data, though. 25,000 or so songs in iTunes, 30,000 or so photographs (about 2000 of which are 4000 dpi tiffs of scanned negs or slides) & about 100 hours of multi-track audio make up the vast majority. My data still fits comfortably on a 3 tb drive & my OS, users & apps on a 500 gb. Spinning platter drive technology is far outstripping my ability to amass data.
I’m pretty scrupulous about keeping things in uncompressed, non-proprietary file formats too, for archival purposes. I very nearly lost about 2 years worth of work that had been compressed using a version of StuffIt that was, after a few updates, no longer supported, & I had to boot a computer from OS 9 & un-stuff a ton of files, one at a time, so that I could open them in OS X. That was a pretty twitchy afternoon.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:51 PM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
I don’t have behemoth amounts of data, though. 25,000 or so songs in iTunes, 30,000 or so photographs (about 2000 of which are 4000 dpi tiffs of scanned negs or slides) & about 100 hours of multi-track audio make up the vast majority. My data still fits comfortably on a 3 tb drive & my OS, users & apps on a 500 gb. Spinning platter drive technology is far outstripping my ability to amass data.
I’m pretty scrupulous about keeping things in uncompressed, non-proprietary file formats too, for archival purposes. I very nearly lost about 2 years worth of work that had been compressed using a version of StuffIt that was, after a few updates, no longer supported, & I had to boot a computer from OS 9 & un-stuff a ton of files, one at a time, so that I could open them in OS X. That was a pretty twitchy afternoon.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:51 PM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
After a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, I discovered that the area of an 1140m, 1/2" tape is less than the surface area of a sphere with a radius of 45 inches.
Any point on a sphere can be reached in *a lot* less than 50-60 seconds (without evacuating the room, too). Just a thought.
posted by Twang at 8:36 PM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Any point on a sphere can be reached in *a lot* less than 50-60 seconds (without evacuating the room, too). Just a thought.
posted by Twang at 8:36 PM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
a sphere with a radius of 45 inches
Can I get that in a wearable?
posted by flabdablet at 1:55 AM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
Can I get that in a wearable?
posted by flabdablet at 1:55 AM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
If we make mag tape into storage balloons, we could hang mesh wifi repeaters off them, too, and your backups would really be up in the cloud[s]!
posted by wenestvedt at 3:34 AM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by wenestvedt at 3:34 AM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
Radius of 45 inches? That's about right for a human hamster ball, isn't it?
posted by Pronoiac at 3:25 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Pronoiac at 3:25 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
More like a B-17 ball turret. (C.f., “...cleaned him out with a hose” &.)
posted by wenestvedt at 3:14 AM on September 4, 2018
posted by wenestvedt at 3:14 AM on September 4, 2018
I know it's late, but here I am with anecdata about some ancient removable hard drive "backups". I ran across the "EZ Drive" (135 MB removable HDDs, ca 1996-1998) and media that have been sitting in my basement since 2001, unused. After scaring up a computer with an actual on-board parallel IDE interface, I could use the drive. I had 10 cartridges (1.35GB! can you believe it? 1.35GB is just rounding error these days).
It only takes 2 minutes to read out a working cartridge (1MB/s). 7 read error-free, 2 read with recoverable errors, and the last one is presently s---ting itself with a surfeit of read errors. Luckily, it's just a copy of the DOS (?) game BLOOD and Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Visual J++ 1.0.
I found some great stuff, like emails with my then-girlfriend, now spouse, from 1996, and some personal source code including an unreleased animation creator for POV-RAY.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:48 PM on September 4, 2018 [5 favorites]
It only takes 2 minutes to read out a working cartridge (1MB/s). 7 read error-free, 2 read with recoverable errors, and the last one is presently s---ting itself with a surfeit of read errors. Luckily, it's just a copy of the DOS (?) game BLOOD and Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Visual J++ 1.0.
I found some great stuff, like emails with my then-girlfriend, now spouse, from 1996, and some personal source code including an unreleased animation creator for POV-RAY.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:48 PM on September 4, 2018 [5 favorites]
I suspect that Amazon's Glacier service (long-term storage, cheap, high latency retrieval) is based on tape.
I recall reading that it was based on high-capacity Blu-Ray discs, of a sort not widely sold on the consumer market.
Then again, given the opaque specification and forgiving retrieval timelines, Amazon would be able to theoretically swap whatever they use for the long-term storage as prices shift.
posted by acb at 3:42 PM on September 5, 2018
I recall reading that it was based on high-capacity Blu-Ray discs, of a sort not widely sold on the consumer market.
Then again, given the opaque specification and forgiving retrieval timelines, Amazon would be able to theoretically swap whatever they use for the long-term storage as prices shift.
posted by acb at 3:42 PM on September 5, 2018
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