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How do you backup your data at home? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 67 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 08 2015, @07:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 08 2015, @07:27AM (#233664)

    I've been working on pricing costs of tape (LTO-x) vs BD-R, particularly with Milleniata now making Blu-Ray M-Discs and not hearing all the bad things about long(er) term BD storage vs DVD+/-R's. For individuals and small businesses, the more worthwhile (outside of true archival) where tape becomes cheaper than BD is totally dependent on how much data you are storing. That is:

    BD has cheap and readily available drives and media available everywhere; these drives are universally (not mandated, but I have yet to find one that isn't) backward-compatible with both DVD (-RAM sometimes missing) and CD. HOWEVER, the media is not as cheap as tapes: the cheapest "junk" BD-R's I've seen are around 44 cents a disk or USD$44 for 2.5TB; LTO-6 tapes are about ten bucks cheaper on E-Bay and most retailers. Oh, yeah, and they're still as slow as you remember (subjectively), but at least are random accessible if you don't use "tar".

    The cheapest LTO-6 drives I've seen on E-Bay are above $1,600; better condition (or name?) drives approach $3,000. None are readily available at retail, and for SOHO use, you need to add SAS or FC to your computer (not possible on a laptop). Transfer rate blows away hard drives, much less optical drives, so you'll probably have to feed them from SSDs or RAID-0 arrays to keep them from shoe-shining.

    OTOH, LTO-6 tapes are the thinnest tapes currently made, and just 3 complete reads or writes (that is, filling up or reading the entire tape at once) eat up most of a tape's official lifetime. If your storage requirements are modest, going LTO-3, which has the thickest tape (and therefore least likely to break and capable of handling much more use), cassettes are half the price of LTO-6 ones or less (for a sixth of the capacity, though), and--here's the kicker--drives are only a couple hundred bucks at most on E-Bay! Many even come with SCSI cards and cables! This is the far cheapest method, but you may need to buy some extra drives since they aren't being made anymore. Oh, and autoloaders are cheap, too, and most can be upgraded to LTO-6 drives if you feel the need.

    Not considering LTO-3 (or even -4) because it's so cheap per GB or TB but "dead", nor considering BDXL because, even at less than $15 a disk it is far more expensive than 4 single-layer BD-Rs, the cross-over point between BD-R and LTO-6 is astonishingly low: factoring in the above "junk" disks at $44 per 2.5TB vs a single 2.5TB LTO-6 tape, paying for a $2,000 LTO-6 drive requires saving only 500TB, or 50 of the brand new shingled 10TB hard drives. Surely your p0rn collection is that large.

    Meanwhile, the cost of tape goes down over time, but the cost of optical media if you want the good stuff goes up dramatically. Digistor BD-Rs cost $1.24 a disk at this moment, while M-DISC BD-Rs cost is a whopping $4.40 per disk! At THAT cost, 2.5TB is $440 versus a $40 LTO-6 tape (rounding for easy math) means you only have to store a whopping 12.5 TB of data to pay for that tape drive. OTOH, the M-DISC is supposed to be good for a thousand years, even if your optical drive isn't.

    Finally, it has been repeatedly said that, for long-term storage, use multiple baskets (media types) in multiple locations for the best chance at long-term survival. This is probably still true today.

    I hope this helps someone out there.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Dr Spin on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:02PM

    by Dr Spin (5239) on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:02PM (#234398)

    I have read 30 year old tapes myself. OK, they were not LTO tapes.
    Quantum - the biggest LTO supplier, were the people behind DECtape more than 40 years ago.

    I cannot read 30 year old H/Ds or most 10 year old CDs. I have considerable difficulty believing that the long life BD stuff will live longer than the company that made the stuff. When the disks start failing, that is the end of the company. And your data.

    Lifetime warranty? Yeah I had one on my car battery. When the battery failed the dealer explained "well, it was guaranteed for ITS lifetime, not yours, and now its dead".

    --
    Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!