Seagate has introduced the Exos M series, a range of enterprise-grade mechanical hard drives available in 30TB and 32TB capacities. The two models, the 30TB CMR ST30000NM004K and the 32TB SMR ST32000NM003K, each offer a minimum of 3TB per disk and use a standard 3.
I have an ibm qualstar lto8 drive. I got it because I gambled, it was cheap because it was throwing an error (I forget what the number was) but it was one that indicates an issue in the tape path. I was able to get the price to $150 because I was buying some other stuff and because ultimately if the head was toast it was basically useless. But I got lucky and cleaning the head and tape path brought it back to life. Dunno how long it will last. I’ll live with it though because buying one that’s confirmed working can be thousands
You’re right that lto8 tapes are pricey but they’re quite a bit cheaper than building an equivalent array for backup that is significantly more reliable long term. A tape is about 12tb and $40-50, although sometimes they pop up cheaper. I generally don’t back up stuff continually with this method, I back up newer files that haven’t been synced to tape once every six weeks or so. It’s also something that you can buy a bit at a time to soften the financial blow of course. Maybe if you get a fancy carousel drive you’d want to fill it up but frankly that just seems like it would break much easier
More modern tapes have support for ltfs and I can basically use it like an external hard drive that way. So it’s pretty much I pop a tape in, once a week or so I sync new files to said tape, then as it gets full I swap it for a new tape. Towards the end I print a directory of what’s on it because admittedly doing it this way is messy. But my intention with this is to back up my “medium critical” files. Stuff that if I lost I would be frustrated over, but not heartbroken. Movies and TV shows that I did custom muxes of to have my ideal subtitles, audio tracks, etc. all my dockers so stuff like my Jellyfin watch status and komga library stay intact, stuff like that. That takes up the bulk of my nas and my primary concerns are either the array fully failing or significant bit rot, and if either of those occur I would rebuild from scratch and just copy all the tapes back over anyway so the messy filing isn’t really a huge issue.
I also do sometimes make it a point to copy harder to find files onto at least 2 tapes on the outside chance a tape goes bad. It’s unlikely given I only buy new tapes and store them properly (I even go to the effort to store them offsite just in case my house burns down) but you never know I suppose
The advertised values of tape capacity is crap for this use. You’ll see like lto 8 has a native capacity of 12tb but a compressed capacity of 30tb per disk! And the disks will frequently just say 30tb on them. That’s nonsense here. Maybe for a more typical server environment where they’re storing databases and text files and shit but compressed movies and music? Not so much. I get some advantage because I keep most of my stuff in archival quality (remux/flac/etc) but even then I still usually dont get anywhere near 30tb
It’s pretty slow. Not the end of the world but just something to keep in mind. Lto8 is supposed to be 360MBps for uncompressed and 750MBps for compressed data but I don’t seem to hit those speeds at all. I’m not really in a rush though and everything verifies fine and works after copying back over so I’m not too worried. But it can take like 10-14 hours to fill a tape. If I ever do have to rebuild the array it will take AGES
For my “absolutely priceless” data I have other more robust backup solutions that are basically the same as yours (literally down to using backblaze, ha).
You got an incredible deal on your tape drive. For LTO8 drives, I’m seeing “for parts only” drives sold for around $500. I’d be willing to throw away $100 or $200 on the possibility that I could repair a drive; $500 is a bit too much. It looks like LTO6 is more around what my budget would be.; it would require a much larger number of tapes, but not excessively so.
I remember when BD-R was a reasonable solution for backup. There’s no way that’s true now. It really seems like hard drive capacity has far outpaced removable media. If most people are streaming everything, those of us who actually want to save their data locally are really the minority these days. There’s just not as much of a compelling reason for companies to develop cheap high-capacity removable discs.
I’m sure I’ll invest in a tape backup solution eventually, but for now, at least I have ZFS with paranoid RAIDZ.