Loading howto/backup.md +26 −0 Original line number Diff line number Diff line Loading @@ -1401,3 +1401,29 @@ TODO: populate Discussion section. ## Alternatives considered <!-- include benchmarks and procedure if relevant --> ### Tape medium Last I (anarcat) checked, the latest (published) LTO tape standard stored a whopping 18TB of data, uncompressed, per cartridge and writes 400MB/s which means it takes 12h30m to fill up one tape. LTO tapes are pretty cheap, e.g. [here is a 12TB LTO8 tape from Fuji for 80$CAD](https://www.newegg.ca/p/12K-00EM-00011). The LTO tape *drives* are however prohibitively expensive. For example, an "[upgrade kit](https://www.newegg.ca/hp-q6q68a-lto-ultrium-7-lto-ultrium-8/p/1HZ-00DX-00040)" for an HP tape library sells for a whopping 7k$CAD here. I can't actually find any LTO-8 tape drives on newegg.ca. As a comparison, you can get a [18TB Seagate IronWolf drive for 410$CAD](https://www.newegg.ca/seagate-st18000ne000-18tb/p/N82E16822184872 ), which means for the price of that upgrade kit you can get a whopping 300TB worth of HDDs for the price of the *tape drive*. And you don't have any actual tape yet, you'd need to shell out another 2k$CAD to get 300TB of 12TB tapes. (Of course, that abstracts away the cost of running those hard drives. You might dodge that issue by pretending you can use HDD "trays" and hot-swap those drives around though, since that is effectively how tapes work. So maybe for the cost of that 2k$ of tapes, you could buy a 4U server with a bunch of slots for the hard drive, which you would *still* need to do to host the tape drive anyway.) Loading
howto/backup.md +26 −0 Original line number Diff line number Diff line Loading @@ -1401,3 +1401,29 @@ TODO: populate Discussion section. ## Alternatives considered <!-- include benchmarks and procedure if relevant --> ### Tape medium Last I (anarcat) checked, the latest (published) LTO tape standard stored a whopping 18TB of data, uncompressed, per cartridge and writes 400MB/s which means it takes 12h30m to fill up one tape. LTO tapes are pretty cheap, e.g. [here is a 12TB LTO8 tape from Fuji for 80$CAD](https://www.newegg.ca/p/12K-00EM-00011). The LTO tape *drives* are however prohibitively expensive. For example, an "[upgrade kit](https://www.newegg.ca/hp-q6q68a-lto-ultrium-7-lto-ultrium-8/p/1HZ-00DX-00040)" for an HP tape library sells for a whopping 7k$CAD here. I can't actually find any LTO-8 tape drives on newegg.ca. As a comparison, you can get a [18TB Seagate IronWolf drive for 410$CAD](https://www.newegg.ca/seagate-st18000ne000-18tb/p/N82E16822184872 ), which means for the price of that upgrade kit you can get a whopping 300TB worth of HDDs for the price of the *tape drive*. And you don't have any actual tape yet, you'd need to shell out another 2k$CAD to get 300TB of 12TB tapes. (Of course, that abstracts away the cost of running those hard drives. You might dodge that issue by pretending you can use HDD "trays" and hot-swap those drives around though, since that is effectively how tapes work. So maybe for the cost of that 2k$ of tapes, you could buy a 4U server with a bunch of slots for the hard drive, which you would *still* need to do to host the tape drive anyway.)
