Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI

blogs.intellique.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 45 posts

Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI

#21

Post by matheusmoreira »

Karunamon wrote: post #5

I'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…

It's not just the expense. Backwards compatibility is only guaranteed up to the last two generations of tape media. If you hold onto these things for decades, you might find the drives required to read them no longer exist.

Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI

#23

Post by wazoox »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #6

I 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.

For backups I'm using BareOS, which is a fork of Bacula. For archival... We wrote our own software, which is mostly free (AGPL3). I should give our github some love though :) https://github.com/Intellique

Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI

#24

Post by wazoox »

Karunamon wrote: post #13
zozbot234 wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

There's the very interesting new feature of LTO7M and 8M, which adds 50% capacity to your LTO7/8 tapes when formatting them with a - respectively - LTO8/9 drive. A 30$, 9TB LTO7 tape is the cheapest storage you can buy.

Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI

#25

Post by zozbot234 »

wazoox wrote: post #24
Karunamon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's the very interesting new feature of LTO7M and 8M, which adds 50% capacity to your LTO7/8 tapes when formatting them with a - respectively - LTO8/9 drive. A 30$, 9TB LTO7 tape is the cheapest storage you can buy.

It's a one-way conversion, and then you're stuck with that one LTO generation; a LTO7M tape won't work anymore in a LTO7 drive.

Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI

#27

Post by wazoox »

funstuff007 wrote: post #11

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.

Nothing prevents you from using open source software with LTO, which is a multi vendor format. You can read tapes written with an IBM drive with a Quantum drive...

LTO 8 tapes are 80$ or so, formatted as LTO8M in a LTO9 drive they hold 15TB uncompressed. LTO7 are like 30$ and hold 9TB uncompressed in LTO7M format.

Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI

#28

Post by wazoox »

One thing I forgot to mention is the M format. Starting with LTO7 media used with LTO8 drives, if you label the tapes with labels ending with M7 instead of L7 the drive will format the tape when first writing it in the 8M format, adding 3TB of capacity to it.

Of course these media can only be read using drives of the next generation.

Notice that first formatting a M9 tape can take up to 45 minutes. That can be a surprise when you first try it! Take this into account if you're time-constrained.

Confusingly, LTO7 tapes with "M7"-ending barcodes are called "8M", and LTO8 with "M8"-ending barcodes are called "9M". Don't ask...

Re: Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI

#30

Post by abbbi »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #6

I 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.

you may check out SEP Sesam, its cross platform and has an community license.
Post reply on HN