Tape Drives

[watercooled]

I know one or two members use tape drives for home backups, and I've recently found myself looking at some used drives on ebay but TBH I don't really know what I'm looking for, so it would be good to get some advice from those who do have them, and hopefully provide some reference for others looking to do the same.

At the moment I cycle a couple of offline HDDs to make entire rsync mirrors of my NAS HDD (which in turn contains various other backups). However, with only a couple of drives and regular cycling, it's possible to inadvertently delete something, only for the delete to propagate to the mirror drives before it's noticed.

Of course, incremental/differential backups with sufficient copies can guard against that scenario, but they're really not practical for larger volumes of data, especially if the contents changes significantly between backups.

It would be nice to have at least some of the contents archived for a while i.e. on tapes, as you can keep large archives relatively cheaply because of the low cost of the tapes themselves.

Of course, the drives themselves tend to be very expensive new, so it only becomes a feasible method of backup over HDDs with large amounts of archiving. Used drives OTOH can go for more palatable prices, hence my interest.

[Jay]

Yes, the LTO4 drives are still a bit expensive at the moment as are the tapes. LTO3 are a little small these days with a max of 800GB if they can get perfect compression

[watercooled]

LTO3 would probably be enough for me TBH. Considering the relatively small volume, it would probably still be significantly cheaper to use 2x LTO3 tapes per backup vs an LTO4 system.

[Jay]

Actually looking at this

http://www.dabs.com/products/maxell-...dia&origin=pla

The tapes have come down in the price, the drives are still a good chunk of cash though.

I hated having to spread my backup jobs across more than one tape, it used to annoy me!

[peterb]

LTO2 and LTO3 drives can be bought relatively cheaply - I started with LTO2 and I've just bought a used LTO4 drive. Don't forget you will also need a SCSI card as well, and for LTO4 you need to have a sufficiently fast data source to stream to the drive.

Some drives will slow the tape speed down if the data transfer isn't high enough - LTO drives don't like start/stop. That said, I have backed up to LTO2 (and 4) over a lan without too many problems.

Good company (where I have bought tapes and my used LTO4 drive) is image store www.imagestore.co.uk (They are showing a refurb LTO2 for £145 - but they are also showing an LTO4 - which I think is the one I bought!

One word though - SCSI cards are available, but SCSI 320 wide cables are hard to find and were expensive at anything from £40 upwards, and you also need a SCSI terminator. SAN had some on offer at a reasonable price though, so if you are thinking of going that route, don't hang about!

(LTO3 and LTO4 drives were available with SAS or SCSI interfaces, LTO4 are available with SAS, SSI or Fibre Channel. After LTO4, the only interfaces are SAS or Fibre Channel)

[BobF64]

(After LTO4, the only interfaces are SAS or Fibre Channel)

SAS is handy though, since you can attach SATA drives to it as well.