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Tape drive backups
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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I have around 65TB backed up on LTO5 tapes. Found them very reliable when needed for a restore and great for an off-site backup.
However I would say it is overkill for anything under 20TB.
How much did this system cost? I have an idea for a product and one of the key parts of it is having a huge amount of local storage. I would need like 10x what you have though.
Don't buy lto5. Lto6 is the sweet spot right now.
I can buy lto6 drives on ebay for 250ish. Tapes are like 15-25 bucks each.
The lto 5 drives are around $400 on ebay and the tapes can be had for around $20 each - less if bought in bulk and each tape hold 1.5TB.
I don't find it that slow as in the event of a restore like i am doing at the moment, I can get through around 3 tapes per 24 hours.
One thing I will say is although newer LTO standards allow you to treat it like a normal drive it works better using proper software designed for the task like Iperius Backup.
If you have a bigger budget around $2k something like LTO7 with 6TB tapes would be fantastic for larger data sets.
How much do those tapes cost if purchased in bulk? I am trying to figure out how much a petabyte storage system costs, and how much physical space this would take up, and how much electricity it would require to run. I had a lot of trouble finding this information on Google because I know so little about tape storage and don't know what all I would need. I am probably not going to actually do anything with this but I am curious because I had this idea for a product and can't get it out of my mind. The most important part (for the hardware portion) is having nearly a petabyte of physical, local storage. I am aware this would be quite expensive and relatively large, but the product would be intended for governments and companies not individuals.
How have I never heard of tape drives for backup before? They seam like the ultimate medium for archival storage. Super cheap although very slow, sounds like a good compromise to me.
because the cartridges are comparatively cheap, yes. but the drives are expensive--minimum $5k (average $8k) for a drive in my country.
Ook, maybe if I ever need to store a petabyte or two for whatever reason.
It's all we had in the early 90s for archiving :)
My folks had a tape backup system in the late 1990s. It used 250MB tapes.
They've been around for decades.
It’s only used in enterprise settings