Re: [PLUG] Blog: John Goerzen: Recommendations for Tools for Backing Up and Archiving to Removable Media

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 9:58 PM Steve Litt via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> The big reason I never use tapes is that five, ten or twenty years from
> now, I might not be able to procure a compatible tape drive when the
> current one breaks, and boom, all my tapes are museum pieces.
>

That's definitely a consideration.  Modern LTO drives are ubiquitous
and standardized, so I wouldn't have too much concern, as long as
you're actually using a modern drive.

The problem is that new tape drives are very expensive, and I suspect
that many using tape at home/etc are using used gear.  If you buy a
new drive today, and it melts in a fire in a couple of years, odds are
you can find a used replacement drive without much issue.  On the
other hand, if you're starting with a cheap decade-old drive today,
and THAT melts in a fire in 5 years, then finding a drive within a
generation of it (the compatibility limit for LTO) is going to be more
tricky.

I have a spreadsheet comparing the cost of hard drives and tape, and
the last time I checked the breakeven point for a new drive was about
350TB.  If you're storing less than that, hard drives are cheaper, and
if you have more than the cheaper tapes start to offset the expensive
drive.  If you buy drives that are 3 generations old on ebay the
breakeven drops to 75TB, which is starting to enter the realm of
reason.  Of course, using a drive 3 generations older requires 8x as
many tapes - each generation of LTO doubles the capacity.  That 75TB
of break-even storage is 50 tapes for LTO-5, for example.  That is a
lot of media changes.  With hard drives you can store that much only a
couple of drives, and with USB3 you could easily mount them all at
once (indeed, many disk-based solutions require you to do so anyway).
I haven't checked but I'm guessing at some point LTO-5 drives will
also become harder to find in working order.

Tapes definitely make sense on enterprise scales where you just have a
ton of data to store.  The marginal cost per TB even for something new
is only $6 last time I checked, compared to something around $15 for
hard drives.  These are all retail prices - anybody buying in bulk
could probably get deals on either.

-- 
Rich
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