TR Forums

The Egg wrote:

My dad was really big on tape backups when we first got into computing and building PCs (early 90's). I remember it being mind-numbingly slow and tedious, difficult to set up, and having really lousy proprietary software. I mostly stayed away from it, and hearing the sound of the drive meant that I couldn't use the computer for several hours. The earlier models used physically larger tapes, but the last tape unit we had was probably a Travan TR-1. I specifically remember it being 400/800MB, with the 800 being a bogus "compressed capacity" that they were somehow allowed to advertise. The tapes looked identical to the wiki picture, and the timeframe follows as well.

I'd certainly trust a properly-stored tape over a mechanical HDD for 20 year storage, but then you'd have to make sure you had working hardware (and software) available to access the data when the time came. It looks like today's drives are priced for commercial use only, and possibly falling out of use even in that sector. If they really wanted to, they could probably make the drives for a few hundred bucks with a USB3.0/3.1 connection, but the general public likely wouldn't have any interest.

Speaking of which, I wonder if any of those old tapes are still around somewhere. It would make for an interesting (and difficult to access) time capsule.

Interestingly enough I have a bunch of mfm/rll and older ide's that still have their data still intact. My old TR-1's and 40 Meg backpack tapes became unreadable decades ago. Granted the tapes were subject to hot and cold temps in the garage over the years but so were the drives.

whm1974 wrote:

I have forgotten about the "Click of Death". But my point was the Zip drive would been easier to use, didn't require special software, and if I need to I can retrieve the files I want without having to load everything else.

I've never had a magneto optical disk fail on me (Fujitsu MO drives). Unfortunately those disks topped out at 1.3GB and are hard to find now. But the tech seems to be reliable. They were a little slow to write but faster than a DVD to read (due to random access). Made for super fast installations of WinNT if you did it from an MO disk copy of the original DVD. I have one each of the SCSI and IDE version of the 640Mb drives.

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:

I've been looking at some LTO drives for a possible personal backup solution recently, since a few old DVD+R discs have gotten corrupt near the edges (they were NOT no-name brands, Verbatim, Maxell) and I doubt that Blu-ray will be any better in that regard.

But I don't know what it's like to backup with them. Say I have a 400GB LTO-3 tape, and I backup my 100GB photo collection to it. Is the drive something I can mount, then I see the file with its filename? Or do I have to pipe the output of tar to a raw disk device? Will I be able to use the remaining 300GB for another backup in the future?

Probably not worth it to be honest.

First off, you cannot mount a tape like you would a drive... with some software packages you can "browse" through your backups as though they were on disk and the software keeps track of which tape it's on, where on tape, etc. and you can restore individual files or folders; but it's still not going to be anything like a mounted drive.

LTO is great for enterprise storage because it's easy to rotate the tapes to an offsite location. And, for very large files (database backups and restores for example) they're remarkably fast. Performance is far less impressive for large collections of files like your photo collection.

Storage is sequential, meaning that when you've backed up your 100gb collection, there is still 300gb left over on a 400gb tape. So say you backed up another 100gb, you'd now have 200gb left and so forth until you've reached the end. However - and this is key - you cannot simply delete the first 100gb and suddenly have 300gb again. New stuff goes to the end of the tape. In fact, if you have a file that you update and save again (let's say you edited a photo) it doesn't overwrite the old file, it saves the file again at the end of the tape. Most software will allow you to reclaim space by copying active data from one tape (or tapes) to a new tape.

So basically, I wouldn't bother with it... you can get (or build) a decent NAS for far less, and it'll be a lot faster and easier to use. Or just grab a external usb drive.

I used to have to hang my own tapes on 2nd shift in my first job. Most of them had a plastic ring that had to be removed, but the fun ones had the auto-threading ring that had a little door in it, allowing the tape to be threaded through the heads and onto the takeup reel by way of the drive's vacuum feature.

Some years later I had a small tape drive in my desktop PC, but that lasted for about a month due to then-incompatible Novastor software, and I have long since gotten rid of that in favor of hard drive backups. I still get advert emails from Novastor and I wish they would just stop it already; it's been over 20 years!

So basically, I wouldn't bother with it... you can get (or build) a decent NAS for far less, and it'll be a lot faster and easier to use. Or just grab a external usb drive.

That would be the best thing to do. Life is too short to mess with tape.

BIF wrote:

I used to have to hang my own tapes on 2nd shift in my first job. Most of them had a plastic ring that had to be removed, but the fun ones had the auto-threading ring that had a little door in it, allowing the tape to be threaded through the heads and onto the takeup reel by way of the drive's vacuum feature.

Self-loading. Bloody posh toffs.

Having to manually thread backup tape #2 every weekday evening probably explains why I can run a 16mm movie projector in my sleep.

It was fun back in the day watching the operator load my tape on an IBM 4300 series computer so I could use the pen plotter to plot my maps. Those drives used air to suck the tape into the right position and then they spun like mad.

Edit I think it was a 4331 upgrade on the system 370 and could run terminals. I typed my thesis on it. Then I got my first PC and typed my thesis at home and uploaded it to the mainframe for printing via modem.

End User wrote:

In a previous gig I was in charge of backups. We used tapes. What a pain in the ass. Seems so archaic now.

Currently I use NAS units in a layered backup with archival to Amazon S3 and its various options.

Archaic but reliable and fast.

We just removed tape and are now a cloud backup and DR solution. Full recovery from offsite copy is 24 hours (previously under 3 hours from LTO3)
But good news for our set up is we have a local staging for offsite replication which allows me to recover in 3 hours...

Back in the day we had one of those tape library gizmos... it had four drives and a rack that held 200 tapes.

We did out nightly SQL backups directly to tape - faster that way - and did our file server backups to a NAS, and then backed the NAS up to tape during the day. Most other times the library was busy doing reclamation (basically as data becomes inactive, it consolidates active data onto new tapes) and swapping tapes out to be sent to remote storage, or swapping them back in again. It was a cool system - when it worked.

Funny story... we kept having problems with the library where it'd drop tapes - basically the little arm would miss when trying to put a tape into the rack. Spent over six months trying to track down the problem, IBM replaced part after part after part until quite literally the entire library aside from the chassis had been replaced. Replaced software, firmware, everything.

Sitting on top of the library was an old laptop that one of the IBM techs had put there when the problem first occurred; it was connected to the library via a parallel cable, and all it did was record the logs from the library - it was an effort to diagnose the problem. At one point we replaced the laptop - because why not - and that didn't fix it either.

Eventually we got an old guru in from IBM, one of their old mainframe guys, and he diagnosed the problem almost immediately. It was the laptop; or, rather, it was the fact that the laptop was there, connected by a parallel cable. Apparently there was a bug in the firmware controlling the library where whenever it was connected to something via parallel it would fill up some buffers over time and once those buffers were full you'd start getting all kinds of memory problems. We removed the laptop and the damn library worked like a champ for years. Apparently the original drop had been a fluke (they happen from time to time) and our mess was caused by the original tech connecting the laptop to diagnose it.

[quote="just brew it!"][quote="whm1974"]... I would have been better off getting a Zip drive.[/quote]
Well, I suppose that's one way to make your backups 100% worry-free. After the drive dies due to the "Click of Death" you don't need to worry about your backups any more, since they are all inaccessible![/quote]

Especially since any attempt to put the affected Zip disk into a working drive would then brick [b]that[/b] drive...

cphite wrote:

Back in the day we had one of those tape library gizmos... it had four drives and a rack that held 200 tapes.

We did out nightly SQL backups directly to tape - faster that way - and did our file server backups to a NAS, and then backed the NAS up to tape during the day. Most other times the library was busy doing reclamation (basically as data becomes inactive, it consolidates active data onto new tapes) and swapping tapes out to be sent to remote storage, or swapping them back in again. It was a cool system - when it worked.

Funny story... we kept having problems with the library where it'd drop tapes - basically the little arm would miss when trying to put a tape into the rack. Spent over six months trying to track down the problem, IBM replaced part after part after part until quite literally the entire library aside from the chassis had been replaced. Replaced software, firmware, everything.

Sitting on top of the library was an old laptop that one of the IBM techs had put there when the problem first occurred; it was connected to the library via a parallel cable, and all it did was record the logs from the library - it was an effort to diagnose the problem. At one point we replaced the laptop - because why not - and that didn't fix it either.

Eventually we got an old guru in from IBM, one of their old mainframe guys, and he diagnosed the problem almost immediately. It was the laptop; or, rather, it was the fact that the laptop was there, connected by a parallel cable. Apparently there was a bug in the firmware controlling the library where whenever it was connected to something via parallel it would fill up some buffers over time and once those buffers were full you'd start getting all kinds of memory problems. We removed the laptop and the damn library worked like a champ for years. Apparently the original drop had been a fluke (they happen from time to time) and our mess was caused by the original tech connecting the laptop to diagnose it.

That is an awesome story. I have seen a few things like that in the world of instrumental analysis also. Thanks for telling that.