LTO does seem to be the last bastion of closed source vendor lock-in. That being said, even if prices dropped by 75%, I'm not sure our shop would look to do LTO instead of a series of hard drives. 20 TB hard drives are now $400.
Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#12I didn’t know about sg_logs: that could be useful. One issue I have encountered and one that isn’t really addressed is that there are different paths (sg, st and nst) for a tape drive, but it isn’t always easy to know which of those device paths is associated with which drive in the changer. It is also possible that the /dev/sg* path number will be different from the st and or nst number. IBM has a lin_tape daemon that reassigns /dev/ns* to /dev/IBMtape* so that’s extra fun if you need to access this information in a repeatable fashion. Beyond the tools mentioned in the article udevadm -a can provide helpful information about a drive.
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#13I'm surprised still that so many people sleep on tape. It is a very mature and stable technology with the best dollars/gigabyte ratio of any storage technology out there. Start up costs are a bit unpleasant but purchasing secondhand is reasonable and economical, and unlike the cloud the costs are mostly one time instead of forever. The tapes are durable and last for decades, so that initial outlay will last you a ver…
The tapes might last for decades, but support for them won't. Newer LTO standard drives can only read tapes a couple generations back at most. So you're pretty much forced to copy your stuff over if you want to stay current.
That's just it, there is no need whatsoever to "stay current" unless you are unhappy with the capacity of the tapes. For multiple generations now, that has been the only difference. The last major feature was slightly better compression followed by LTFS, and that came out on LTO 5 and 6… In 2010 and 2012.
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> free, automated software for managing the system and performing tasks such as backups Did you come across Amanda[1] or bacula + bacularis[2]? 1: http://www.amanda.org/ 2: https://bacularis.app/doc/index.html
I hadn't seen Amanda before. Bacularis looks like it might help with the complexity of setting up Backula. I might try that out. It's hard to get the motivation to mess with these tools that have relatively little documentation/examples and are purely config file based.
That's fair. I used to use Ark, which was mostly a proprietary front-end for bacula, and that exposed me to the kind of futility of a "user-friendly" tape interface. Every tape operation from picking to winding to r/w takes so much time, and has so many subtle ways that it can fail, that it defies attempts at friendly user interfaces.
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#15A tape drive actually led to my adoption of Linux.
Around 1999, I decided that a QIC tape was the best backup solution for my home network. At the time, I had a 486 running Windows, and two Apollo 425t running OpenBSD. The 486 may have also dual-booted into OpenBSD.
Anyway, I had a bare-bones 386 sitting around and I had upgraded the 486 so much that the spare parts were available to reconstitute the 386. I found a nice floppy tape drive, consumer grade, and wouldn't you know that OpenBSD didn't have floppy tape drivers. So I installed Linux on the 386 and it was a dedicated backup server.
At the same time I had a SyQuest EZ 135 that I was very fond of, and those 135MB cartridges could hold good stuff, like a complete complement of Windows updates. But its capacity was too low to be a backup solution, of course; it was storage on-the-go.
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#16LTO does seem to be the last bastion of closed source vendor lock-in. That being said, even if prices dropped by 75%, I'm not sure our shop would look to do LTO instead of a series of hard drives. 20 TB hard drives are now $400.
If you fall in the right place on the curve $75 / LTO-8 cartridge still makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t take many $400 hard drives to make up the price for a tape element at that per-cartridge price. (Assuming you can deal with sequential access, etc.)
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#17I was able to purchase a LTO-7 library full of tapes a few years ago for basically nothing, and still haven't gotten around to using it. There seems to be very little in terms of free, automated software for managing the system and performing tasks such as backups. tar doesn't exactly cut it for hands-off usage. The best I've found is using Veeam Backup & Replication, but it's Windows only and not great still.
> free, automated software for managing the system and performing tasks such as backups Did you come across Amanda[1] or bacula + bacularis[2]? 1: http://www.amanda.org/ 2: https://bacularis.app/doc/index.html
Wow, amanda. That brings back memories of using that newly released software (~2000) for swapping tapes daily on a drive hooked up to a sparc 5.
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tapes might last for decades, but support for them won't. Newer LTO standard drives can only read tapes a couple generations back at most. So you're pretty much forced to copy your stuff over if you want to stay current.
That's just it, there is no need whatsoever to "stay current" unless you are unhappy with the capacity of the tapes. For multiple generations now, that has been the only difference. The last major feature was slightly better compression followed by LTFS, and that came out on LTO 5 and 6… In 2010 and 2012.
If your drive breaks down while you’re trying to do a restore, you’re going to want to get a spare one quickly. That may become a problem if you choose not to stay current.
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> free, automated software for managing the system and performing tasks such as backups Did you come across Amanda[1] or bacula + bacularis[2]? 1: http://www.amanda.org/ 2: https://bacularis.app/doc/index.html
I hadn't seen Amanda before. Bacularis looks like it might help with the complexity of setting up Backula. I might try that out. It's hard to get the motivation to mess with these tools that have relatively little documentation/examples and are purely config file based.
Bacula is great software, but yes, fiddly to set up and SCSI tape drives / changers aren't really straightforward either. It will serve you well once all is set up though.
I worked for a company using Bacula quite successfully for many years with a 24 tape system. It was much better than the proprietary software the system came with.
Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI
#20LTO does seem to be the last bastion of closed source vendor lock-in. That being said, even if prices dropped by 75%, I'm not sure our shop would look to do LTO instead of a series of hard drives. 20 TB hard drives are now $400.
Hdds are soo fragile. They constantly break. A proper 3-2-1 backup solution is incomplete without tape IMHO.