this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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datahoarder

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Who are we?

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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With Google Workspace cracking down on storage (Been using them for unlimited storage for years now) I was lucky to get a limit of 300TBs, but now I have to actually watch what gets stored lol

A good portion is uh "Linux ISOs", but the rest is very seldom (In many cases last access was years ago) accessed files that I think would be perfect for tape archival. Things like byte-to-byte drive images and old backups. I figure these would be a good candidate for tape and estimate this portion would be about 100TBs or more

But I've never done tape before, so I'm looking for some purchasing advice and such. I seen from some of my research that I should target picking up an LTO8 drive as it's compatible with LTO9 for when they come down in price.

And then it spiraled from there with discussions on library tape drives that are cheaper but need modifications and all sorts of things

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[โ€“] cm0002@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, yea it looks like this is gonna be a long game to acquire lmao

How repairable are these things?

In my experience? Minimal. Although when you buy a single drive for over $1k you're also not super into cracking it open and repairing things. From what I can tell, it's like a blu-ray drive, but more complex, and more delicate. Not to mention since it's tape you technically need a clean room, because dust can fuck up the heads.

If I could source decent drives for less than 10 grand I'd be a huge supporter of it, but us pro-sumers are pretty much left with ebay.