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Hdds are soo fragile. They constantly break. A proper 3-2-1 backup solution is incomplete without tape IMHO.
At least HDDs are fast, cheap, don't have massive up-front investments. You can take a couple of HDDs, RAID them together for reliability and you can still write and read data at humane speeds.
Source: Former HPE Storage dev.
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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.
> If you hold onto these things for decades It's always amusing when people bash tapes for the lack of backwards compatibility, but... Hey, try to find a working system with PATA drives support? Try to connect SATA150 drive to SATA-III port? How about SCSI-320? People like to talk, but I always said what if your data has a value then it's your responsibility to have means to backup and to restore it. If your data "is…
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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.
This is what I mean, LTO sits in this niche where it is/was popular in the enterprise and so the secondhand market is big. I would be willing to wager that I will be able to find LTO 6 drives in another 10 years, with no problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you hold onto these things for decades It's always amusing when people bash tapes for the lack of backwards compatibility, but... Hey, try to find a working system with PATA drives support? Try to connect SATA150 drive to SATA-III port? How about SCSI-320? People like to talk, but I always said what if your data has a value then it's your responsibility to have means to backup and to restore it. If your data "is…
SCSI 320 HBAs are pretty easy to find in the usual places nowadays. And they work on modern systems.
Can anyone comment on the brands of tape you can purchase? Given it is an open format what sets the brands apart? Are there records of failure rates like backblaze has done with HDDs? Currently for LTO8 tapes you can buy the following brands: * Fujifilm * Quantum * IBM * HPE * Oracle * Dell EMC