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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

#71

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…

> I don't recommend backing up to HDD's. They are prone to early failure from portable use because of vibration and drops.

Your backup device should stay at home, on the desk or in the closet where you hide your networking equipment. There's very little benefit to trying to carry around your backup device with your laptop on a regular basis, and if you do, you still need another backup device that isn't going to get stolen at the same time as your laptop.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do if you find a checksum error? ZFS mirror will fix it for you.

What do you think I do? Copy from the last good copy.

ZFS does that, except with error correction codes applied against bitrot. All you gotta do is turn on a ZFS-system and hit the "scrub" command. That automatically checks all checksums: and error-corrects all data that fails a checksum.

If anything, ZFS makes that whole system you just described easier and more automatic. Its not really hard for me to push the "scrub" button on my Nas4Free box every few months.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 12 TB HDD ... This is not home market, Indeed. The home directory on my PC at home has 80GB of files stored. Most of it is just there out of laziness. About the only thing I try to keep backups of are my tax returns. What do people have on a home machine that needs enterprise-grade backups? You might say photos and videos. I guess that's a personal thing; I realized a long time ago that I never spent any time actua…

100% agree. I have a NAS for photos and media, plus a big USB HDD for ZFS snapshots of my machines - but all of this is homelab tinkering, not an actual backup strategy.

I realized in the last year or so that the only digital media I have which I would be genuinely sad to lose were wedding photos - so I saved those to 3 different cloud providers, made a Blu-ray copy, and a copy on the NAS. If I lose all of that in some tragedy, chances are I've got bigger things to worry about.

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

#74
post #41
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.

What makes you think I meant home use?

The first person pronoun you used ("I") strongly implied personal use.

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

#75
post #2

Great, so when can I buy one and how much will the tape drive cost? The largest issue with tape is that the drives themselves cost absurd amounts, and you better not cheap out because failure is both time consuming and scary. Swapping tapes continues to be human intensive and restore times long. But the tapes themselves are so cheap that at this scale it becomes worthwhile again.

Doesn't really sound like it's aimed at you. Tape is for serious long-term, high-volume storage. If you've got a limited budget for the tape device it's probably not designed for you in the first place.

I understood the exact opposite that you have understood, and I find your comment quite uncomfortable, as a result?

The parent is clearly seeking to confirm serious long-term use, as you say, in considering the costs of failure cases.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't really sound like it's aimed at you. Tape is for serious long-term, high-volume storage. If you've got a limited budget for the tape device it's probably not designed for you in the first place.

I understood the exact opposite that you have understood, and I find your comment quite uncomfortable, as a result? The parent is clearly seeking to confirm serious long-term use, as you say, in considering the costs of failure cases.

> I understood the exact opposite that you have understood, and I find your comment quite uncomfortably presumptuous, as a result?

Is this a question? I can't tell you if that's how you find my comment or not, sorry.

They wants a cheap tape device because they just want to use it in the home. Tape devices aren't cheap... because they aren't aimed at use just in the home.

They aren't aiming at home users - I think that's a simple fact not presuming anything.

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

#77
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 love this thought, but have some doubts. So far, storage is still following something resembling Moores law, but it will probably hit physical limits way before a year of youtube (probably 30 of these new tapes or so) fits into your hand.

HDDs are hitting physical limits, SSDs still have growing room. You can already buy 100 TB SSDs.

https://www.newegg.com/nimbus-data-dc-100tb/p/2U3-002M-00004

Following Moore's law of 2x density per 18 months, in 10 years we will see single drives of:

100 tb * 2^(10 years/1.5) = 10,159 TB

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

#78

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…

>affordable sata SSD

This. Even 100MB/s SSD will do. We need a type of NAND and SSD that offers High Capacity and low speed and low cost. The Current 2TB is ~$170, compared to a 2TB Portable HDD at ~$60.

And I am wondering, if Silent File Corruption, bitrot etc are things of the past on SSD? Does BTRFS / ZFS even make sense on SSD?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Green-1TB-Internal-SSD-WDS100T2G0A/dp...

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

#79
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think I meant home use?

The first person pronoun you used ("I") strongly implied personal use.

No, it just means the person has the ability to purchase. They could be purchasing it for themselves or on the behalf of another organization.

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

#80
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

Storing even 5 TB of data onto bluray disks requires 100 disks of 50 GB dual layer capacity. That's a lot of disks.

Yeah. And that too if you are willing to ignore the really slow speed to write them all!
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