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this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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datahoarder
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Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
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I've done a good chunk, but I haven't found a good source for tape drives. Mine I bought second hand and it overheats and I found that it actually fails it's testing, so be extremely weary on buying them. I did LTO-8, but I've been waiting for years now for them to drop in price. (I probably did the same comparisons as you, TB/$ pricing).
The biggest thing is to make sure you support LTFS. I've tried multiple softwares, even down to
tar, but LTFS will make your life simpler. It acts as a simple mount in linux, you just copy and paste.Tapes themselves are all pretty much the same. I buy them new, never used, just like HDDs, and they're cheap enough that who cares. Note that the compressed sizing will never be reached. Remember that most ISOs are already compressed, and most of your data is already compressed, you can't compress compressed data, so it's pretty much a straight shot.
Tape can be a great option, I keep mine in a safety deposit box, fully encrypted. However getting it all set up is a pain in the ass. If you find a good drive at a good price, let me know.
Thanks, yea it looks like this is gonna be a long game to acquire lmao
How repairable are these things?
In my experience? Minimal. Although when you buy a single drive for over $1k you're also not super into cracking it open and repairing things. From what I can tell, it's like a blu-ray drive, but more complex, and more delicate. Not to mention since it's tape you technically need a clean room, because dust can fuck up the heads.
If I could source decent drives for less than 10 grand I'd be a huge supporter of it, but us pro-sumers are pretty much left with ebay.
Do you have any distro or hardware advice? I have an external drive, and I've bought several fiber channel cards for it and none of them seem to work either with my motherboard or distribution.
I used an LSI 8i SAS card, with a standard SAS cable to my internal SAS tape drive. Then I just used plain ubuntu to get it up and running. The LSI cards are my go-to for anything SAS, used them for 10 years and never had a single one fail.
Edit @constantokra@lemmy.one I remembered I had this saved, this saved me a ton of time setting up my drive last time, everything I needed: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/lto-tape-drive-linux-experience-4175620090/
That's a great resource. Thanks for sharing.
I probably should have gotten a sad drive, but I found a good deal on an external fiber channel one and I didn't realize how difficult fiber channel cards could be.
I'd be interested to hear how it goes, I'm looking at replacing mine. If you get yours to work, please report back. I'm actively looking for a new LTO8 drive