Hey folks, being the family IT man I’ve held onto all of my families photos/videos over the last 20 years

I’ve been pretty careless with the backups and I know if I don’t do anything it’s only a matter of time before I lose them

Although I’ve never used them, tape drives seem to be the best so I thought I’d ask here if anyone uses them for their homelab?

It might be overkill for a few GB of photos but I’d also use the tape drives for data hoarding purposes so it’s a win win in my book

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    How much did this system cost? I have an idea for a product and one of the key parts of it is having a huge amount of local storage. I would need like 10x what you have though.

    • cass80@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Don’t buy lto5. Lto6 is the sweet spot right now.

      I can buy lto6 drives on ebay for 250ish. Tapes are like 15-25 bucks each.

    • shellington@lemmings.worldEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      The lto 5 drives are around $400 on ebay and the tapes can be had for around $20 each - less if bought in bulk and each tape hold 1.5TB.

      I don’t find it that slow as in the event of a restore like i am doing at the moment, I can get through around 3 tapes per 24 hours.

      One thing I will say is although newer LTO standards allow you to treat it like a normal drive it works better using proper software designed for the task like Iperius Backup.

      • shellington@lemmings.worldEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        If you have a bigger budget around $2k something like LTO7 with 6TB tapes would be fantastic for larger data sets.