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Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

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Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#51

Post by pizza234 »

webmobdev wrote: post #5

That's good. But when will it ever move out of the enterprise market? What I really want is an affordable Tape storage for us common folks / home users to archive data long term. It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years to a new CD / DVD / portable HDD. There is a market for home users that really don't want to put their data on the "cloud". And this generation is really creating so mu…

A 12 TB HDD requires 10 GB/day for three years to be filled. This is not home market, it's professional market or hoarding (by today's standards).

Objections on the failure rate of HDDs are absolutely valid, but then one should also need to consider the bigger picture (e.g. storage loss), in which case, having a remote copy is also important.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#52

Post by baybal2 »

webmobdev wrote: post #5

That's good. But when will it ever move out of the enterprise market? What I really want is an affordable Tape storage for us common folks / home users to archive data long term. It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years to a new CD / DVD / portable HDD. There is a market for home users that really don't want to put their data on the "cloud". And this generation is really creating so mu…

Except for a brief period in nineties, tape never been aimed at consumer storage.

I think the market for tape will always be the same few giant companies for whom it will be priced just a bit less than the next cheapest option.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#53

Post by pwdisswordfish5 »

jariel wrote: post #3

We reached an inflection 'amazing!' point when we are able to put '100 songs in your pocket'. That was really a shocking thing given the limitations of CD/Tape etc.. But the real inflection point may come when 'all relevant information in your local disk'. The tapes here in question can maybe store every book every written! We may be able to put the entirety of Wikipedia, every film, TV Show ever made, every book eve…

I share your childlike optimism. But another thing (that neither of the sibling comments mention) is write speed. Having a ton of capacity to store massive amounts of data at rest is not the same thing as being able to easily make near-instantaneous (or even slow) copies. Getting all that data on there is going to be a problem, and so it would only be economical for data sources in high demand, not unlike the way that optical media get the pits and lands stamped in at the factory based on an expensive master. "All of YouTube" might be (probably is) in high enough demand, but it would also require cooperation from the gatekeeper of that content, who at this time has adverse incentives because it's making (many times) more money selling ad impressions for basically every view that it's able to. Even aside from that, what other large datasets are in the same demand category such that the work could or would be subsidized in that way?

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#54

Post by monocasa »

weare138 wrote: post #36
vondur wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is geared for enterprise settings, not home use. I believe someone mentioned these drives costing $25,000. I do agree reasonably priced tape drives with TB of space for home users would be great.

The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k. https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-000A-000M5 https://www.provantage.com/quantum-tc-l72an-br~7QUAT0JW.htm

That $300 drive is an LTO-2 drive. It's so old that it's parallel SCSI.

I'd be surprised if you could even get tapes for it that aren't sketch grey market stuff that you wouldn't want to use for backups anyway.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#55

Post by martyvis »

weare138 wrote: post #20
chrisseaton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I store on an external HD, and every year I buy a new HD and copy across to it and verify checksums against my records. Costs basically zero and low-effort. What am I missing?

Low cost, high density and a low failure rate compared to HDs. That's why it's still used in the enterprise for backup solutions.

Actually nearly every enterprise backup system my company has deployed in the last 5 years is tapeless. Most systems involve snapshot backup management that are replicated across multiple disc/SSD systems. (I'm the network guy, so not my focus area)

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#56

Post by prirun »

weare138 wrote: post #36
vondur wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is geared for enterprise settings, not home use. I believe someone mentioned these drives costing $25,000. I do agree reasonably priced tape drives with TB of space for home users would be great.

The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k. https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-000A-000M5 https://www.provantage.com/quantum-tc-l72an-br~7QUAT0JW.htm

The first tape drive is a 200GB (native / uncompessed) internal SCSI drive. Not so easy for a consumer with a laptop to use.

The tapes are pretty cheap at $8 on Amazon if you buy 20.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#57

Post by [deleted] »

devwastaken wrote: post #34
webmobdev wrote: post #5

That's good. But when will it ever move out of the enterprise market? What I really want is an affordable Tape storage for us common folks / home users to archive data long term. It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years to a new CD / DVD / portable HDD. There is a market for home users that really don't want to put their data on the "cloud". And this generation is really creating so mu…

The solution is generally to not be doing full duplicative backups but to check hashes between already backed up files and new files, only backing up what you need. I don't recommend backing up to HDD's. They are prone to early failure from portable use because of vibration and drops. What we need are more affordable sata SSD's. Currently nvme SSD's are very close to the same price. If you could sell a 1TB portable u…

[deleted]

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#58

Post by est31 »

monocasa wrote: post #48
webmobdev wrote: post #5

That's good. But when will it ever move out of the enterprise market? What I really want is an affordable Tape storage for us common folks / home users to archive data long term. It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years to a new CD / DVD / portable HDD. There is a market for home users that really don't want to put their data on the "cloud". And this generation is really creating so mu…

So having worked in the tape library space, they don't really make sense for home users. They say that they have a 50 year lifespan, but everyone in the industry knows that's a blatant lie these days. The tape customers transfer everything over to the new generation every 2 to 3 years, so it's never tested and none of the customers really care. You also only get a couple hundred writes to a tape in it's lifetime. Tha…

That's precisely what you need if you want to upload some backups from NAS systems or similar.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#59

Post by londons_explore »

Znafon wrote: post #16
londons_explore wrote: post #10

Last I looked into this, if you had a lot of data to back up (Say 1 Gbyte per second, continuous, with a retention time of 1 year), it was still far cheaper to simply use hard drives. One employee can keep up with all drive replacements, hardware setup, etc with time to spare. Drives aren't super power hungry, so any old office building is suitable. Encrypt the drive contents on another site so you don't need 24/7 se…

You don't have to do it this way, you can just use encryption at rest with a different key for each user and throw the key when a user ask for deletion of their data. No need to get all the backup back to scrub them one by one.

Our lawyers didn't think that sufficient to cover ourselves. Upon finding out it wasn't going to cost many millions to simply scrub the actual data rather than the keys, they came back that it was money well spent to delete the actual data.

It was mostly because a user might share data with another user, for example two users at the same postal address. Our fraud team needs to be able to look stuff like that up, so there need to be database keys on stuff like that, both in the backups and in production. If one of the users with a specific address has a GDPR deletion, we need to delete that users data, but if another user has the same address, we still need to keep the address itself. Yet if both users have a GDPR deletion apply to them, as well as deleting the address, we need to delete the fact both deleted users had the same address (even if we don't know the address, because the pattern of which deleted users shared info with other deleted users could identify them)

See... it's complex! Simplest solution properly delete the data and rewrite the backups!

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#60

Post by monocasa »

est31 wrote: post #58
monocasa wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So having worked in the tape library space, they don't really make sense for home users. They say that they have a 50 year lifespan, but everyone in the industry knows that's a blatant lie these days. The tape customers transfer everything over to the new generation every 2 to 3 years, so it's never tested and none of the customers really care. You also only get a couple hundred writes to a tape in it's lifetime. Tha…

That's precisely what you need if you want to upload some backups from NAS systems or similar.

$100 each starts making way less sense when they have the same semantics as a burned optical discs for home users.

These days the main benefit to tape is the physical safety of having the media be inside a cartridge, and the streaming read speeds are stupid fast so you can reconstruct a backup faster.

Home use, even with a data hoarder sized NAS, is better served with a bluray burner with multiple copies.

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