I'm surprised still that so many people sleep on tape. It is a very mature and stable technology with the best dollars/gigabyte ratio of any storage technology out there. Start up costs are a bit unpleasant but purchasing secondhand is reasonable and economical, and unlike the cloud the costs are mostly one time instead of forever. The tapes are durable and last for decades, so that initial outlay will last you a very long time.
The tapes might last for decades, but support for them won't. Newer LTO standard drives can only read tapes a couple generations back at most. So you're pretty much forced to copy your stuff over if you want to stay current.
That's just it, there is no need whatsoever to "stay current" unless you are unhappy with the capacity of the tapes. For multiple generations now, that has been the only difference. The last major feature was slightly better compression followed by LTFS, and that came out on LTO 5 and 6… In 2010 and 2012.
If your drive breaks down while you’re trying to do a restore, you’re going to want to get a spare one quickly. That may become a problem if you choose not to stay current.
In which case I'm going to eBay where I probably got the original drive in the first place over 10 years ago, and a quick look finds thousands of listings for both standalone and internal drives, at good prices, from reputable sellers with good history, going all the way back to LTO2 (which is almost 2 decades old!).
This is what I mean, LTO sits in this niche where it is/was popular in the enterprise and so the secondhand market is big. I would be willing to wager that I will be able to find LTO 6 drives in another 10 years, with no problem.
There's the very interesting new feature of LTO7M and 8M, which adds 50% capacity to your LTO7/8 tapes when formatting them with a - respectively - LTO8/9 drive. A 30$, 9TB LTO7 tape is the cheapest storage you can buy.
It's not just the expense. Backwards compatibility is only guaranteed up to the last two generations of tape media. If you hold onto these things for decades, you might find the drives required to read them no longer exist.
It's always amusing when people bash tapes for the lack of backwards compatibility, but...
Hey, try to find a working system with PATA drives support? Try to connect SATA150 drive to SATA-III port? How about SCSI-320?
People like to talk, but I always said what if your data has a value then it's your responsibility to have means to backup and to restore it. If your data "is extremely valuable" but all your C-level are approving is a single drive decade old library - you can write your backups straight to /dev/null, because your data is worthless for your C-level.
I'm not "bashing" tapes, I'm pointing out the fact they have limited backwards compatibility guarantees. Given the massive expense of tape drives and the fact you need to keep replacing them and the tapes just to keep up with new LTO standards puts this almost perfect solution out of reach of mere mortals like me. I'm not an enterprise, there is no "C-level" approving anything.
Oh, this wasn't pointed at you at all, sorry for the misunderstanding.
> Given the massive expense of tape drives and the fact you need to keep replacing them and the tapes just to keep up with new LTO standards
Well, you don't need to keep replacing them. The rolling upgrade (gradually replacing the tapes and drives for a new generation) makes sense only if you have tens to hundreds of drives and thousands and thousands of tapes - ie for those insane enterprise libraries. For everything else, be it a small enterprise or a "mere mortals" it would be always cheaper to just buy a whole new library/autoloader.
And if the cost of initial buyout is too much then of course tapes aren't for you... along with the compatibility woes.
Until they don't. And modern systems doesn't have PCI-X slots. Sure, there are still Adaptec cards out there... which doesn't exists as a company since 2010/2016. And I have a first hand experience with HP P800 not working in PCI-E 2.0 slots. Are sure your old SCSI320 card would work in something like PCI-E 4/5 or even newer?
