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

[Azabua]

I just got my hands on two HP StoreEver MSL 4048 and one 2024 with some drives from Lto-3 till Lto-8.
I plan to backup my data to them. I will report if I get it too work on Windows.
Also I don’t need all three of the so I plan to sell the ones I won’t need.
And there not all just IBM under the hood IBM ist just buying them as well.

[ChrisA]

I’ve had this thread open in a tab for ages, as I was interested in tape drives a few years ago.

I first looked at price of brand new, but found it a bit hard to swallow. Then I looked at the second hand market, but was concerned about the longevity of a used drive.

I confess I gave up in the end, instead I’m about to have up to 4 copies of my critical data (TrueNAS), all automatically backed up. With electric costs being significant (UK) they are run weekly only

It’s a shame, I worked in a company where tape backup was one of my duties, and it was the ONLY copy made. When someone did an accidental delete, I was able to restore from tapes that were many years old. I did have to instruct people about the temp/humidity sensitivity though.

[cakeisamadeupdrug]

@crener

I’m mainly looking to backup the 3TB though it grows 100-400GB a year.

Tape backups aren’t dead, but I wouldn’t consider them for this amount of data. I went with a large HDD for backing up a comparable amount of data as you.

[crener]

I was looking through some shelves of stuff a few days ago and found some old 2TB hard drives so that’s essentially what I’ve done with the more important data.

Still annoying to have sections of my data I’d rather have safe not backed up in some offline way…

[ChrisA]

That’ll certainly do, just need to go through the tedious process of checking for integrity every now and then I guess.

I’m quite lucky to have an outbuilding/office I guess, as that can serve as my quasi off-site backup. I guess if I hadn’t built that, I might have made a small box, heavily insulated and raised it off the ground, and stuck a server in that (with IPMI!). Yeah the 'vid certainly had a huge impact on my data storage arrangement, mainly cos I didn’t get out as much and needed something to occupy my time!