Tape Backup Prices

[Digimer]

On 11/30/2010 11:25 AM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 08:42:43PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
>>    Why tape? It's so 20th century.  A 32 gig USB key is approx $65.  Try
>> pricing out 32 gigs worth of reliable tapes, not to mention tape drives.
>> Tapes are an expensive anachronism.  Check out the prices at Canada
>> Computers or where ever.  This is bog-standard technology, not weird
>> proprietary tech.
>
> And an LTO-4 holds 800GB per tape.  That's a lot of USB stick swapping.

800gb native or 2:1 compressed?

> USB stick probably writes at 20MB/s for a good one.  The LTO-4 writes
> at 120MB/s.
>
> They are hard to compare.

My biggest problem with tape has always been their tendency to silently 
fail. Sure, doing monthly mock restores help to catch this, but clients 
rarely remember to do so.

These days, I'd recommend an external drive carrier with eSATA for 
backup. You should easily get 40+MB/sec. Use rsync and backups happen 
very quickly. If you really want speed, then install an SSD into the 
eSATA carrier. Even modest SSDs boast ~200MB/sec write speeds.

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Digimer
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