Hey folks, being the family IT man I’ve held onto all of my families photos/videos over the last 20 years
I’ve been pretty careless with the backups and I know if I don’t do anything it’s only a matter of time before I lose them
Although I’ve never used them, tape drives seem to be the best so I thought I’d ask here if anyone uses them for their homelab?
It might be overkill for a few GB of photos but I’d also use the tape drives for data hoarding purposes so it’s a win win in my book
Definitely do not do tapes.
I’d also recommend Backblaze. Their S3 compatible storage is pretty affordable. I backup to a Kopia repo and then replicate to Backblaze nightly.
Tapes require so much more work to keep up to date and night not even be cheaper over time.
Great question! If it’s only a few GB I wouldn’t bother with tape. There are other options like
- Google Photos - I’ve been using it for 10+ years without filling up the free 10 or 15 GB, whatever it is.
- Burning a bunch of DVDs, repeat every 5 years.
- Get a couple cheap hard drives then replace 1 of them every 3-5 years so one is always fairly new.
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 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.
Hetzner Storage box is $20/month for 10tb.
Forget the tapes. This is hard to say but just pay for online storage. It’s $9.99 a month for 2TB from Google and Apple. Your data will be safe and accessable by family if something happens to you. You could also get a cheap NAS like device like this https://a.co/d/dgsnQbr and maybe every couple of months you create a offline backup onto another device.
@BigTrout75 @Squiddork and ffs print out some instructions on how to access it all. And tell someone where you’ve put that.
Consider using a decent password manager and you’ll only need to let your loved ones know how to get into that.
Tape drives will be expensive and likely beyond overkill for this. I’d recommend you grab a blue ray DVD writer and use that instead. The discs are generally shelf stable for 25 years and hold about 50-128GB depending on the disc. Duplicates are cheap, storage is relatively easy, and it doesn’t require constant upkeep/power like a hard drive would. Downsides? They just stopped making the discs, so they’ll grow in cost over time. That’s about it that I can think of.
Sony stopped making recordable Blu-ray media. Other companies such as Panasonic and Verbatim are still in production.
If your purpose is long term archival you should probably be using M-Disc Blu-rays anyway, which are still actively made by Verbatim (and one other company).
My advice is avoid tape backups. The cost, risk of media degredation, and management overhead make them not worth it, especially for a homelab.
Also, restoring an entire VM is almost easier than recovering a single file, just because of the sequential nature of reading data from a tape. Data recoveries are pretty slow in general.
I backup to an external hard drive with regular copies to iDrive S3. Been doing it that way for a number of years with no problems.
Tape is unfortunately uneconomical for regular people due to the drives costing so much, unless you get a used, older generation one.
How many GB’s do you mean? Maybe try some optical discs, BD-R at 25GB maybe.
Otherwise just rent some online storage. Hetzner Storage Box is cheap and Storage Share is only slightly less cheap, and has lots of sharing features (it’s really NextCloud).
If they’re considering optical media, typical BD-R, while viable, may not be be the best choice. BD-R M-Discs would probably be a better choice for backups. Especially if they’re planning on needing access to the data over a period of decades, which would be potentially useful for familiy photos/videos and critical documents.
They are more expensive, as is the drive needed for them, but not by enough to be out of reach or even unreasonable given the additional durability of the discs.
Backblaze r2 is $6/tb/mo first 10gb are free
Looks at my 60tb media archive
There’s got to be a cheaper way.
OP mentioned GBs not TBs. But also, I only backup stuff that I can’t redownload, which doesn’t include my linux isos. I def wouldn’t backup 60tb of media unless its family stuff, but that’s me. You do you.
+1 for Backblaze. They have a convenient backup software too that works great. I backup my parents laptop using it, and use their S3 storage for my NAS backups.
DVDs are the same idea but easier
Why do tape drives seen to be best? What’s your use case? They’re still used in enterprise environments because they’re insanely dense compared to hard disks, and it’s real easy to load a truck with a few petabytes to ship elsewhere. Is that what you need? Density? Seems like not for just a few gigs.
If you want backups you need to ship your media, tapes or otherwise, off-site.
Pop your files into a cloud service and call it done. If you’re looking for long term archives and don’t want to use other people’s computers, burn some DVDs and store them at someone else’s house.
There are 24tb hard drives now.
