I’d really like to start backing up certain data from my NAS to tape, or some other form of long term archival media. Specifically I want to back up my photos. What I have been doing up until this point is a back up to a separate NAS (of everything on the NAS, not just the photos), and then backing up the photos to blue ray. The problem with the blue ray is that my photo collection has gotten so big it’s not really practical and way too time consuming.
I know there are different generations of LTO, with varying price points (the newer drives being very expensive).
Has anybody started backing up their data to LTO in some kind of “economical” fashion?
Basically, since hard drives are about $10-15/TB at the moment (closer to $10/TB if you can get a good price), they recommended just writing to a hard drive and storing them cold with updates a few times per year. With something like ZFS, you can verify the data integrity each time, and even make the data redundant across a few of them.
You don’t need ZFS (or BTRFS) to do that. Tripwire, Aide, Integrit, etc., or PAR2 will do the job just fine on any filesystem.
But yeah, if only just reaching a data size where Blu-ray isn’t economical, rotating 2-3 hard drives in USB cases will be the next step. You have to need to write a lot of data for tape to be economical.