Affordable tape drive for windows/Linux (+ software recommendations)

High-Performance Computing Workstations & Servers
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Does anyone know of a good guide for finding and using a tape drive?

Ebay seems to show that LTO-6 drives are somewhat affordable but I don’t want to have any idea about the software requirements to use of of those. I was looking at a cheapish Dell drive but then couldn’t see anything on Dells site (I guess the model is discontinued for newer tape standards), when looking at the newer models all I could see was the enterprise Dell Gui stuff which isn’t really something I want to casually use.

I assume that I’m not the first ‘consumer’ to want a tape drive. Surely someone has made some reasonable software that runs on Windows or failing that Linux that I can use to dump data onto the drive.

Please point me in the right direction :slight_smile:

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I am also interested in this, will boost the thread. From my 30 seconds of research 5 years ago, Sony had the best “consumer” version but I don’t think they got much cheaper on the secondary market.

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As long as its LTO-5 or newer you can use LTFS which is just readable in windows. You can also use Veeam

Hopefully its okay I plug my own article

The instructions listed will work for almost anything, as most tape drives are IBM under the hood

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I used to use iperius backup to write to an LTO-4 drive on windows because it was the easiest to use.

Not to knock on LTO too hard but it isn’t cost competitive with just swapping out hard drives until you get into many dozens or hundreds of terabytes. The only other area it excels at is if you had to ferry around large amounts of data physically and you needed it to not break during rough handling.

Another thing you’ll want if you buy a used tape drive is the drive’s corresponding low-level utility so that you can monitor the finite head life of the drive.
Tandberg’s TDtool; HP’s Library and Tape Tools; IBM’s ITDT

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So I guess that just shows up as a drive, that’s not too bad. I was thinking there would be some extra program that would be needed to talk to the thing and then manage the data that way. LTFS seems pretty cool.

On Ebay at least it seemed like Dell had some tape drives that were cheap though I can’t seem to find any software for them which makes me question if that would even run under Windows. Based on what @twin_savage says HP and IBM seem to have accessible software so maybe that’s the way to go. I’ll have to wait until a cheap unit comes along though…

Is there anything to avoid when looking for a drive or is it all just the same thing with a different badge on the front?

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Sorry @crener i was confusing tapes with Sony’s Optical Disk Archive. Sharing in the event it fits your use case as an alternate solution.

https://pro.sony/ue_US/products/optical-disc

There’s software provided from Sony’s side but I would not be surprised if there is a licensing fee thou.

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More googling and apparently there are a bunch of IBM tape drives (Quantum LTO 6 8-00974-02) but they all seem to be for Scalar i500 which seems to be a larger tape loader. Does anyone know if these can be used with a desktop? I can’t seem to find any docs about it, just people selling them

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Tape drives are literally went on their way to the dinosaurs.
Some drives you could get with the ide interface but most were scsi.
The ide ones often worked with windows but usually you had to install a driver to even detect them.
Even when they were detected by bios they could only be accesses through the backup and restore software.
They were not searchable like other media.
You could also use the ide to sata adapter.

While they did indeed store a large amount of data they were damn slow to access.
Tapes themselves were susceptible to magnetic fields and could degrade over time, but usually failure resulted in wear and tear.
It was crucial to keep the heads, rollers, and capstan clean.
The other foible, belt wear!
Unless you got one with direct drive capstain you had to deal with stretched belts and dry rot.

Its one of the reasons i quit using them.

Optical media ( providing it was stored in a cool dry place) last many times longer and by far much more economical.

If you want to use them, its up to you.
But your in for an expensive ride.

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Tape drives aren’t dead yet, but their use case is very limited(very large amounts of data, very rarely read, stored for very long time).
HDD/SSD/Optical might be more affordable. Would you mind telling us the amount of data that you need to backup? And how much new data is expected to be added to the backup, say per month? You probably want to plan for full and incremental backups, testing your backups with checksums, writing the tapes to new tapes when needed, and where to store them. Tapes don’t mean you don’t have upkeep.

Regarding software on Linux, you can often get away with just tar(and maybe some shell script plus cron).
Tar was actually “designed for” tape drives(it stands for “Tape ARchiver”), but evolved into the most common Linux archive format. It should come pre-installed on most Linux distributions.
You can do full or incremental backups, and don’t need to seek in a way “incompatible” with tapes.

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When you say optical media I think of blue rays which are only 100GB per disk (or 50/25, I guess depending on what is most affordable at the time).

There is this stuff but it looks dead as the drives themselves have been discontinued and the ones that are for sale are way more expensive than even the newer tape drives (LTO-8 which stores 12 TB uncompressed per tape for €71).

Are you talking about blue-ray or is there some lesser known disk technology that people use? (I’m genuinely curios even if I don’t end up going this route cause I don’t hear much about this)

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I’m mainly looking to backup the 3TB though it grows 100-400GB a year. Then I have another 6-ish TB that is nice to have backed up but not the end of the world if lost.

I was looking at LTO-6 cause it fits my current 3TB size quite nicely without compression. In 2 years that would be just 2 drives uncompressed or 1 compressed. I always feel a bit weird about using compression in backups cause it might make recovery a little harder if a little piece of it gets corrupted, is the built in compression something that has these kinds of issues?

Maybe waiting for LTO-9 might trigger some datacentre somewhere to offload LTO-7 drives which I can get for cheap? Probably just wishful thinking though.

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Providing your data is not corrupted compression is not an issue.

Its been a very long time since ive studied compression😳 but from what i understand from classes ( over a half century ago)!
So this might not be accurate.
Early compression was removing all spaces, tabs, and indents, and paragraphs.
Leaving a number representing what it was.
Translation to machine code, then to binary for storage by the compression software.
This 3 step process dramatically reduced the size of the file.
But like i said earlier, it might not be accurate because im an old fart🤣

Numerous shareware utilities ( pkzip, / pkunzip, 7 zip, etc) were available for this.
But many os’s come with their own backup programs that give you the option of file compression.

The problem with backing up large amounts of data is that media size is a problem.
Things to consider:
What is the importance of the data?
What will the cost of storage be?
And what will the long term reliability of the storage media be?

Optical media such as blueray for long term storage,
pros:
much lower costs highly reliable, and relatively immune to magnetic corruption, searchable, and much higher speed.
In controlled temperature environments they can last centuries.
Cons:
Easily damaged by excessive heat, excessive sunlight, dirt scratches and being fragile in excessive cold.
And limit in size.

Tape drives
Pros: larger storage capacity due to recording procedure, and the size( length) of the tape

Cons: susceptibility to magnetic fields, fragility of the media, ( heat, cold, wearing, stretching, tearing, wrinkling, etc)
Slow speed.
Excessive cost for media, and drives.
Maintenance expenses.
And lastly the magnetic fields of the recorded data itself will fade over time if not refreshed periodically.

The major conundrum here is, technology is rapidly outpacing the storage capabilities.
Look at how cdr and dvd are faring right now as compared to just 10 years ago.

Sure the dvd may last a long time ( 100 plus years)in storage
But will the drives be around that long?

Thats too far into the future for me to see.

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I guess it is blu-ray like? The two most recent gens use cartridges in the 3-5.5Tb range. Write-once only. The 1st Gen has multiple writes at smaller sizes but as you eluded too they are sunset products. I don’t know about tape as well as you do. In what you’ve shared I would anecdotally say tapes may be cheaper. I also may be wrong with this but are tapes slow? Here you get transfer rates in the 1Gbps/write, 3Gbps/read area. Their sales team says its “resistant and has a 100year life”, so to @Gnuuser point the real question is how important is your data. Apparently the Vatican uses it.

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Depending on the index position on the tape
The drive has to start from the beginning and rewind/ wind to the proper location of a file.
The tape head itself remains fixed position.

Optical drive moves the head to the indexed sector and track as well as the media rotating
Much shorter search and read time.

What they are today i couldn’t tell you since i quit using tape drives over 20 years ago.

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For this size of data, you might be better off with HDDs.
I think it should be cheaper because you don’t need as much equipment(You’d probably need at least 2 tape drives for a proper backup, because if one fails you can’t get to your data until you have another tape-drive, and ordering a new one, if possible, could take days to weeks. Best to get 3 or more).
Yes, the tape drive media is cheaper per TB, but your I think in this case the static and running costs aren’t worth it.
(I think bluray isn’t cheaper per TB, but haven’t checked for a while)

Here’s what I think you should do:

Backup strategy
  • Buy a bunch of cheap drives, enough to store your important data at least 3x, with room to spare(e.g. 4TB * (3x redundancy + 1x spare).
  • Put some drives in an “online-backup solution”, meaning reachable via network, make automatic incremental backups of live data
    • This is your “main” backup with the most recent data that you can restore the fastest.
    • This could even be a cheap consumer-grade NAS
  • Put some drives in a storage room for “cold-backup”
    • not network reachable(“offline”) and lasts for a long time
    • In case online backups gets ransomware’d.
    • Make sure storage conditions are good(temperature, humidity)
  • Put some drives in another location for “off-site backup”(In case a building burns down or other natural disaster)
    • Mostly the same stuff as for the “cold-backup”
  • Make a nice backup plan:
    • Swap out disks in the “live-backup server” every once in a while
    • Regular tests for all backups: live, cold, off-site. A backup is useless when you can’t restore it!
Compression

Compress data or not?I think you should.
You can use both HDDs and Tape with compression, as long as you’ve got enough redundancy/parity data.

It’s not that compression makes you more susceptible to bitrot. It’s just that sometimes a single flipped bit in some compression schemes can result in a larger block of invalid data, compared to “plain binary”(same with encryption).
Every bitrot has the potential to make a file unreadable, compressed or not(bitrot destroys information). But you can absolutely combine compression with redundancy/parity information, to detect and correct bitrot. In that case it doesn’t matter if your data is compressed or not, as it should always be correct, as long as you’ve gotten enough parity information.

There is some irony in first trying to remove any redundancy from a file(compression), and then re-introducing some on purpose(redundancy/parity)…

Keep in mind that compression can lead to other problems, e.g. you might have enough storage for the compressed image, but not the uncompressed data.

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That’s exactly why I don’t like it especially with tapes/discs where a scratch or imperfection in the recording medium can lead to bad blocks. I know there are algorithms to recover the data (like a scratch on a DVD is usually corrected by the hardware when possible) but with densely packed data it makes me a little nervous. If I was to zip things together a parity archive format would possibly be the way to go?

My question was more about he compression claims on the tapes themselves. All the tapes I’ve seen say “X capacity uncompressed, X2 capacity compressed”, there seems to be a standard compression system that tapes use which I was more interested in the reliability of if anyone has first hand experience with that sort of stuff?

So the optical media your referring to as cheaper is Blue-Ray? (if it’s something else I would love to read up on it)

Looking at blue-ray I can find them for around €22/TB (ebay) which isn’t too bad, especially considering that the drives are ubiquitous. Question is how long are they going to keep making discs though? Film and TV are seemingly stopping releases which means that production lines making blue rays might start to constrain supply.
Though saying that floppies where in production till ~2011, 30 years of production is pretty good considering BlueRay only come out in 2006 though the prevalence of blue rays is definitely not as large as the floppies so who knows

Optical disc archive seems to cost 9k (source) for the drive and a single disk with a $92 (1.2TB) to $183 (5.5TB), plus shipping cost to Europe but at 9k that’s a drop in the bucket. Still it’s quite pricy, aside from the fact that these readers are quite rare (no used market for instance) with the risk of being discontinued. I also have a feeling that the software side is probably cause issues first with no way to repair/replace. I would avoid this because it’s obscure and expensive, personally.

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Yep, It would be but I have HDDs already (they are great) but want to move closer to a 321 backup strategy and have the data stored on another different medium.

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Is nand in that mix? Working with 12TB on 1, 18TB of HDD on 2 and legal docs plus other must not lose docs on proton drive as 3.

PS tell me if I am adding zero value to this thread and I will sit back and watch

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Ah, the good-old-321.
I think the advice of using multiple media types is a bit old, or depending on how you define “different media”, already met:
It’s not really about having different media, but different modes of failure and having an extra degree of separation in your backups.
For example, the failure modes of a typical NAS for “hot-backup” are completely different that the failure modes of the pile-of-drives “cold-backup” strategy, and thus could be considered “different media”. Having a “cloud backup” service like https://www.backblaze.com/ could be considered a different media.

EDIT: Conclusion: I think not having tapes in 2023 is fine, but YMMV, they’re not dead yet.

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Ideally I would have cold storage which I can put in a box somewhere or store a bit of data at a family members house by having a HDD/SSD/tape/disk lying there without having to think about it to much.

In my mind tapes are probably the best at achieving this cause of storage density and the long shelf life. Though blue rays seem like a good alternative (if only they stored more so data can be kept together in larger chunks, maybe there are automated systems for reading large collections of blue-rays?).