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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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I absolutely agree with you, hovewer lto-9 18tb tape costs same money 20tb hdd costs
Yea but the tape is likely to last the 20-30 year estimate. You couldn't say the same about HDDs especially the helium sealed ones.
Whether the tape drive will survive as well is another question but between the simpler mechanism, a drive 2 generations ahead can still read the tape, parts inter-compatibility if you needed to frankenstein an older drive with new rollers and motors and just plain buying and keeping drives sealed in storage as new-old-stock ahead of time. You have a few options to choose from.
Where as with HDDs you may have to repair each one. The helium ones you may have to re-gas.
Tape sounds like a better long term archival/backup approach.
Long term yes, i absolutely agree with you, however, you sure you'll survive next 20-30 years? For datahoarders and home server solutions 20tb hdd is better, while as you've said and i agree with you that for long term storage tape is better, but with speed of web development nowadays, archived data will become obsolete blazingly fast, so lto tapes is very special case while HDDs offer more memory for the same price and designed for constant rewrites and have more layman interface (sata) so they better for your average home server data hoarder
Well I'm in my mid 20's so I'm hoping for at least that long :). No I won't likely need alot of what I store to last that long although I am a member of r/DataHoarder (not sure if they're on lemmy yet) but for a few items like family photos/videos it's nice to have it written in a way that I can mostly just set and forget. With the standardization and open source implementation of LTFS you have even less worry about having the software to read it in the future. A SAS IT mode HBA and linux with a git clone of the LTFS repo is all you need.
In terms of cost the drive was very expensive ($2500 NOS from eBay US) but if you treat that as the one off entry cost, the tapes are cheaper for me to buy than the equivalent in HDDs here in Australia. That's comparing ~$460 20tb EXOS HDDs from serverpartdeals.com to $43 x 8 = $344 2.5TB LTO-6 from stutchdata.com.au.
Also I store the tapes in IP67 boxes from bunnings along with a pack of desiccant and put the boxes in a cool but damp area. Don't really have alot of choice where I live. It's either that or hot daily temperature swings. Basement vs attic/garage.
I hope that's enough to store them correctly environmentally speaking. I am in the process of working out how to clean family VHS tapes that were not stored correctly and that's not an operation I want to revisit. An extended project is to make 900mhz button cell humidity/temperature monitors to notify me when desiccant has expired.
This may seem excessive but I would argue most don't do enough in an age where more and more is being stored digitally as the only copy rather than print, etc. I feel this is a small price to pay to keep the still more compact and convenient all digital lifestyle without the data loss issues most people experience. The drive was expensive to buy into but with how little I use it I hope it's going to last a long time.
Yeah i agree with you, most people don't do archives of data, and if you do archive then lto tapes is the best, hovewer most data hoarders just like me just wanna hoard data, just as simple as that, no deep meaning, and for casual hoarding server stocked with hdds with zfs and deduplication and compression is just the right fit, however, i feel you, data needs to be archived for future since corporations isn't interested in this, and games, videos, music, and many many more other things i can't even imagine just disappearing without archiving, so those who archives is MVP, but most data hoarders is just guys and gals who just want to have autonomous library of media on their home server/lab, so while i feel and understand and support your idea, what I've been trying to say is, most people want autonomous library and as cheap as possible, HDDs are better for it while for archive purposes lto is the best as we agreed in our previous comments, and about surviving, I've seen enough cases when people die just like that and current geo political situation ain't helping, also if you frequently read bad news publics then you'll know that literary anything may happen, car crash, aneurysm, some rando going on a rampage, some gas explosion, some fire, some drunk courageous blokes wanting to have violent fun while you wandering in evening, so i prefer just setting long term goals and doing them, and yes, I'm mid 20s just like you, however seeing how people can just die in their daily life, i ain't betting on anything, just doing my goals, that's it