Tape drives are consumable. LTO tape is abrasive, this cleans the heads but also wears them down. I used to manage a scientific computing facility with a PB scale rape archive. We ingested maybe 50 TB a day to tape, and would chew through one of the 8 drives at least twice a week.

I know this is a typo, and I don't usually point out such things, but maybe fix "rape archive"

It certainly made me stop and reread the statement.

I didn't even notice until I read the comment below. My brain just saw tape, I had to go back and reread it to make sure it hadn't been corrected yet.

Was this same generation drive and tape? I've only seen this be this bad when doing MP (LTO4/LTO5) reads/writes in BaFe-targeting drives (LTO6/LTO7).

These old MP tapes are like sandpaper to new drives.

At work we also refer to LTO5 tapes as sandpaper tapes - glad we're not the only ones with the realization. If we have a significant restore involving archived lto5s, we immediately plan for additional wear and drive repairs. :(

That being said, this does apply within generation to a lesser extent as well.

I might have worked at your company/project. :)

Actually, yes, a bit of account stalking says you have. m( Hey there! Folks on the team still miss you.

> Tape drives are consumable. LTO tape is abrasive, this cleans the heads but also wears them down.

Is it possible to replace the RW head on a tape drive? I guess the manufacturers generally don't want this to be easily replaceable, so they can sell more drives...

Almost universally the business model for significant deployments would be that you have maintenance contracts anyway. That's kind of how the tape business works, certainly if you have libraries as well. In that case you get those drives RMA'd.

We had a service contract. The drive basically contacted IBM and I had a new drive on my desk in 4 hours. I made enough friends at IBM that they left a stock of spares.

Are you using green media? Green media is very abrasive and it's recommended to burn them in before usage. This can literally saves you thousands upon thousands in tape drives.

I'm curious for more details. Are these full-height or half-height drives?

Was this "rape" archive at the Vatican perhaps?

Ya, this is an odd article. It seems aimed at the consumer. Maybe it's a lack of imagination on my part, but I can't think of a consumer use case that calls for tape. I think the article could have benefited from spelling one out.

I was considering to mirror my cold storage backup (12 bay NAS with a few hours uptime per week) to tape for long term archival of private data (e.g. photos) or stuff on the internet I think is worth having a backup of (e.g. the http://unrealarchive.org).

But the tape storage requirements and danger of running into trouble with the reader (especially considering I could get a misaligned one when buying used, and if that one breaks => tough luck) convinced me this isn't a good choice. [edit] For the same money I can just get a bunch of additional disks, and use two for simple, redundant, offsite backups; and the remainders to swap out old disks in the NAS pre-fail.

For what it's worth, the tape drive head has to align to the servo tracks on the tape. Both on read and write.

Do manufacturers even offer consumer-grade tape backup solutions nowadays? Do tape drives even use USB, or is the tech still using SCSI? I can't seem to get a straight answer from Google, but I doubt it.

The interesting thing is that for long term high reliable cold storage (for e.g. research data) using a bunch of tape robots seems to still be quite viable idea. (The robots read, check and replace broken tapes automatically getting data from tapes can take long so you normally put some form of sdd cache in front of it.)

Then you place the tape robots into a fireproofed room with exhaustive protection measurements (e.g. filling the whole room with CO2 or similar on fire alarm, having extra fireproofed doors which are comparable with bomb shelter doors etc.).

Exactly what I was thinking. Tapes may be efficient while you're not accessing the data on them, but data you're not accessing is ultimately useless. You need the infrastructure to restore from backup, and if you've got so much data backed up that the cost savings of tape really matter, you might have to backup (and restore) so much data that the lower speed also really matters.

Out of curiosity, where are you keeping them off-site? I have about 15T of used storage right now. I have it in a RAID and then backed up to another RAID in my home, but I am missing the third piece of the backup puzzle. Are you just putting them in a safety deposit box? Or do you put them in a colo of some kind?

For personal backups (unless you're the king of personal Big Data) tape doesn't make sense in most cases.

Where tape shines is for offsite copies, DR copies, or duplication for safe keeping of any kind, not backups.

Tape will work for backups, but you have to structure your working processes around tape (serial access) to the backed up data. If for you "backups" includes rapid access to an old version of a file you edited or deleted by mistake and pulling in data that's too old for you to want to keep on expensive disks so you can process it, tapes aren't a good option, for reasons of access time.

Most modern IT professionals would use NAS or SAN snapshotting to handle the first case above, where you did an oops and need a copy of the file as it was before that. A snapshot directory on a NAS usually gets implemented using a journaling file system or some other mechanism for maintaining a point in time view of the system, so you're not keeping another complete copy of your data, only journal entries listing what changed when.

For the second case where you have too much data to fit on your expensive SSDs and you might need to use some of it e.g. next week or next month, what you want isn't tape, it's a cheaper hard drive. IT types usually call this "near line storage". State of the art spinning hard drives are a good option, but if those are still too expensive you can go a couple generations of technology back and get lower price/TB. The problem you run in to doing this is that you need more physical space and hardware and power/cooling for the lower capacity drives.

Tape is great for when you want to keep data but may not need to access it ever or might need to access it months from now, and when you can accept a delay in access of a day or two. DR copies, offsite vaulting of data for legal purposes, logs from systems you want to keep in case you ever need to check back on what happened 5 years ago, bulk data from experiments that may never be accessed again but which could be critical for someone if it's needed (and may therefore turn out to be extremely valuable)... those are the scenarios for tape, and the price per TB stored is lower than anything else.

The company where I work off sites data for long term storage regularly, including a copy of our main ERP database. We meet legal compliance requirements the cheap way by copying stuff to a tape we can access and paying someone to store it for us. Backups of production systems are done to disk, to a NAS or SAN block storage device that is then copied to tape if needed.

Edit: Forgot to mention the ERP databases' size... it's in the Petabyte range, it runs the entire company. If we tried to transmit it to a cloud backup provider, without spending a giant amount of money on a high speed internet connection we'd never complete a daily backup before it was time for the next one. On top of that, if we need 2 copies of it the storage price gets very high very fast - cloud storage is very convenient, but costs more than even local spinning disk. Tapes,on the other hand have a small incremental cost if we already have the drives and robot, and we can make as many copies as we like by paying only for the tapes and the time.