This legit reminds me of my tech class I took in high school. We had recently gotten an old tape drive from my old middle school and we were all messing around with it moving all the tapes around and after about 5 minuets of goofing with it, we fried the entire system and then realized that it was still worth $2,000 bucks on eBay.
As an editor in the UK, LTO is the one of best long time archiving solutions around at the moment. I use it every day for backing up and restoring media and projects and it's been very robust over a long period. The migration issues exists but as long as you don't massively up your backup requirements, earlier versions of LTO with smaller capacities do just fine. Another system to check out Linus is ODA, although I'm not sure it's still in production.
ONE BIG WARNING - LTO6 tapes ARE NOT READABLE/WRITEABLE in LTO7 drives. This breaks the "2 generations" rule and is because older MP tape will destroy the heads on LTO7 and upwards drives in short order and is going to make migration harder for established tape-based setups like mine (I have several thousand tapes and we normally age out over a couple of rotations) WRT "older LTO versions" - beware of drives going out of production. I've had far too many instances of people showing up with long-obsolete tapes asking if they can be restored. The answer is usually yes, but at steep costs via external vendors (7-track open reel 70s stuff is about £250 per reel, QIC80 about £100/tape, so it'd better be justifiable)
@@thewhitefalcon8539 correct, up to LTO 4, tapes could only store a bitstream. LTO 5 added the partitioning needed to write a file table, and LTFS was born. You still lose about 100GB of capacity that it cordons off for the file table. This happens because data on tape is written in shingled bands down the width of the tape called “wraps”. You can’t write to an earlier wrap without risking overwriting the wrap in front of it, so LTFS sections off a big chunk of tape for the file table. It also will never overwrite old data or parts of the file table for this reason. That’s nice, because you can recover old versions of the files/filesystem on the tape, but it comes at the cost of using up tape space for old files. Since tape should only be used for backup and archiving, and since LTO 5 is 1.25 TB (and each gen roughly doubles from there), the drawbacks of LTFS rarely come up. If the tape fills up with old data, you can always wipe the tape and start over. After all, that tape had better not be your only copy of that data.
Nice to see some LTO/enterprise level stuff! I'm in the film industry and we use these things all the time. You forgot the best part of tape though, you can physically lock the tape to read only so people can't overwrite it later.
I too work in the film industry, and posted a question about some LTFS commands on a forum the other day. Got no answers, only people saying "lol its 2018 who uses tape." So I'm happy to see there's at least one other person out there who knows what's up!
james brill not entirely true, you can purchase WORM drives (cool name right) basically Write Once Read Many. I've used that for Government work for compliance
@@shrimpypyeah but most data loss will be from random drive failure or electrical issues. An entire building burning down in order to destroy the tapes is far less common.
There's a story somewhere of an IT guy meticulously archiving data to neatly labeled and organized tape cassettes, only to find out all of the tapes were blank when they tried to find an old file. TEST YOUR BACKUPS REGULARLY
I think I remember hearing similar. Had something to do with them locking the tapes in a vault nightly, and the magnetic locks essentially erasing the tapes when doing so.
That's right! No excuses today as VM environments let you test your backup and recovery procedures safely without affecting production servers and data. All systems should have documented backup and recovery procedures for Operating Systems, data and applications.
Yep, tape is actually industry standard for archiving and has been for some time now. It's essentially the backup of your backups, anyone who works professionally knows the importance of this.
The problem with that 40 year tape life is that while the media may last that long, the drives may not, and as you pointed out, there is only 1-2 generations of backwards compatibility. Which means having to move tape contents each generation or risk not being able to access it in the future because you no longer have a drive that will read it.
I am curious, why not buy a small robot loader instead of the single drive? was it for the thunderbolt? A Overland T24 with LTO-8 drive stores 24 tapes, can be driven by excellent software like Archiware, and you dont have to baby the tapes every day. Just load up blanks, give it a schedule and forget about it, for slightly more than you paid.
Happy to see LTFS and LTO finally arrived at LTT, unfortunately they choose the "fancy" way (guess thunderbolt was the buzzword). A library and a proper archiving SW would make a more professional approach....
Exactly. A 2 drive system (I use HPE in my shop) like the MSL 2024 is $2500, and 2 x LTO8 drives for is are another $9k. That gives upwards of 2TB an hour of write performance if you're using both drives, and over 250TB of storage uncompressed in the chassis. 15 hours to back up 4TB of data is insanely slow on LTO8. My quick calculations show that's running at 75MB/s, or 1/4 speed for LTO8, or 0.25TB/Hour. At around triple the cost you can backup 10x faster, have the entire PB backed up in about 3 weeks, and with that speed and cost per TB you can double up your storage for secondary archival storage offsite. At 24x7 backup on their current system, they're looking at 160 days to backup a full 1PB. Realistically? Call it a year with the time taken for verifying and failed backups.
I was very much surprised the company I work for was using Tape for backup's, I wasn't really in the Data Backup space before so just assumed everything was on disk. But someone had the smart idea so now they are going the Cloud route even though we technically speaking were our own cloud storage. Which is pretty helpful when restoring a 50gb folder takes hours now instead of minutes.
'Cloud' is 'just somebody else's computer', running drives or whatever =)) No 'magical reliability sauce' with that LOL U can bet there is some 'fine print' in all those 'cloud backup' contracts that if the restore fails they 'are not liable' 2 refund U N E of that $ U kept paying them, as in, who knows if they R ever really storing N E of your $hit @ all LOL
Brad Viviviyal There is a reason why tape is still used in enterprise environments. Blu ray discs are not a good solution as you need a SHIT ton of them to make up 1 tape
Ted Stranix Why it would make sense? The year price of storing a 12 TB tape is north of $600. Then comes the price of retrieving the data. Not cheaper by any means. A LTO-8 tape costs like $225, less in bulk.
Tape has always been archival quality. A disc in storage? A bit (pun intended) of oxygen leakage will corrode the surface storage media rendering the data useless...
In about 2 years he might buy 15 more of these tape writers, hire a person whose job is exclusively to manage them, rent a climate controlled storage unit to put the tapes in (with an optic fibre cable between it and the studio obviously) and upgrade to 16k footage which literally only he will be able to watch.
A warehouse with little robots driving around with server trays filled with tape drives, forklifts for the really high racks, the whole deal. Throw in an amazon drone for no reason as well.
All the US national laboratories use tape storage for data sets and archive of computer code. Just too much for other avenues. I've been on experiments that store a couple terabytes of data per week. Large experiments can range into the terabytes per day. There is a mass storage stub file that is stored on a "regular" server which acts like the directory listing for all the stored files. It contains the soft link to the actual file and data such as the size of the file. When we need to analyze a data set we first request the data file be "cached" to a set of write-through servers. Once the file is cached, then the analysis program is feed to the auger system which distributes the analysis job to the farm machines. If one is clever this can be done all with scripts that are nearly automated. I'm only 1/2 clever.
Yesater Day : I bet. I do research at Jefferson Lab in Virginia. Their tape system is small in comparison and it is still impressive. It is also the only room on site that has more safety interlocks than the accelerator. I guess they don't want a graduate student in there.
The software Linus is featuring is based on LTFS , a self describing tape format, which allows browsing on the tape. Usually take archiving is based on automated database driven software, which holds an index of where the file is stored on tape, when recovering data than there is a special client which triggers the procedure (moving, loading, reading) depending of the size of the library this of course takes some time...
D0T3XE : I'm a professor a bit farther north (~1000 miles). I don't have any pictures of the computer center and currently can't find any on JLab's website. It might be possible for you or a group from CNU to visit with the IT personnel at Jefferson Lab if you have an interest in the application of HPC and mass storage. Computer Engineering, eh? Good stuff. A friend of ours has a daughter in that area. Looks like fun.
@@phprofYT Right on. I'll have to ask my Physics Professor or my advisor if they know anything about it/or have photos. Both do research at JLab currently.
When I did work experience at school, back in 1994 I think, I worked for 2 weeks at IBM North Harbour. They had a subsidised cafe, you could have those fancy chocolate ice creams with your lunch. It was my dream job, computers and ice cream. For 2 days I did the job of that tape robot. The washing machines would request a take number and you had to go find it. Somebody would request data and they had to wait for me to find it from the library and load it in. Now that's LATENCY!! 8@ You also had to file the used tapes back in the correct slot, put redundant tapes into the scratch bin and load blank tapes from the scratch ready rack. The data was processed by ES9000s. They were so fast, they no longer used MFLOPS, but GFLOPS!!! They were liquid cooled monsters the size of shipping containers. I last saw people doing EXACTLY THE SAME JOB in 2010 in New York state somewhere. German Town or Tarrytown or something.
Yup. Anyone workin in a datacenter knows these things in and out. Also all the bugs and annoyances with them. They are incredibly efficient and almost used by every company here in germany.(psst. Also the German Bundeswehr) especially since you're legally bound to backup all data for 10 years.
Finian Blackett Tapes are not ridiculously slow - they're significantly _faster_ than _all_ mechanical drives and outrun most SSDs on sustained activity. Where they lose out is on random access and price. A good (small) robot with 80 tape slots will set you back $9-12k, and LTO7 drives to go in it will be $12-15k apiece. LTO8 drives are currently around the $20k apiece mark, more if you want dual port (and you _do_ want dual port) If you want something like a floorstanding 500 slot unit with 5 LTO7 FC drives in it, then don't expect change from $150k-$200k and you can expect to spend $20k on the _hardware_ of a backup system to drive it, simply to keep up with the drives - and don't bother unless you have 10Gb/s + 100Gb/s core infrastructure, else you're going to get choked by network congestion regularly. For the cost of a drive, there's no point in using tape unless you need to backup at least 20-40TB and once you hit those levels you don't want to be feeding drives by hand unless you have _very_ cheap labour and a death wish for your drives, so a robot is the default choice.
@@tf2excession This is actually the fastest AND slowest storage you can get. Fastest in write throughput, slowest in single file retrieval. I haven't seen a better backup/archival solution. Cheapest price per GB and very reliable. Older LTO-generations are very affordable.
During one of your videos I was internally screaming to myself, "TAPE STORAGE!" entirely based on an article I read a while ago. It had to do with google loosing some 44,000 accounts worth of emails due to some software failure that caused them to be deleted across several backup servers, but they were all recovered over the course of a few days due to the tape backups. It makes sense. As long as nobody tosses a magnet in their general direction, your data is safely off the internet and can serve as a geo backup. Run the backup automatically every night, swapping out tapes when they fill up and removing them from the location manually, or have them back up over the internet to a different location where you do the same. That way you still have the fast access from the storinator, plus off site backups that are safe from hackers.
I love tape, you can do some fun stuff. On one of my first trashcan workstations, I booted my OS (slackware) from a work salvage DLT tape drive into RAM, and wrote changes to tape on shutdown. Sure, it took 30 mins to boot and 30 mins to shut down, and when I wanted to access files outside of the 1GB of RAM that I had available to load data into, it was a serious chore, but I loved the system at the time because 100GB HDDs where hundreds of dollars, and I could add 100GB for somwhere around $50, plus the drive was free. Took forever to make the modifications to the bootloader and kernel to make it work though.
I do all my backups to dual-layer Blu-rays and it works for me. I used to backup to DVDs a long time ago and use the same drive to access old backups occasionally. I also backup to the cloud, using 7-Zip to make that manageable. I also use a RAID 1 configuration for my main drive(s) and use external hard drives for automatic backups with Allway Sync.
@@LifeboatFoundation and here I am no backups and all my hdd's are like 8 years old. This will be my year for new storage. I did try and figure out how to put my bluray Burner in my newest system but honestly there is no way to make a Corsair 570x look good and clean with an ODD in it.
@@JohnyKnox "bluray Burner in my newest system but honestly there is no way to make a Corsair 570x look good and clean with an ODD in it." It isn't easy to find a case that has good support for 5.25" internal drives, you could go with a 5.25" external drive. My case is the Corsair Obsidian 750D Full-Tower Case - Airflow Edition and I rock two Blu-ray drives in it and it has space for 3. You can see the case at amzn.to/2H5nDnE
I'm sure a lot of people find tape archiving surprising and/or hilarious, but it's standard in studios and creative agencies and has been for years. > Local server sync to offsite server 'mirror', which makes daily/biweekly/weekly/monthly whole-server (or 'changes') backups/archive. Getting something from a backup was a PITA though, had to specify close to root level folders and get the whole lot, and what date you want the backup from which could take around a day to deploy on to your local server. These kinds of redundancies sound expensive, but once a studio or agency gets past 20 people or so, it starts making A LOT of sense.
@@juschu You are quite right. I removed many tapes that did not want to eject. Sometimes the costumer tried to get the tape back himself, destroying it in the process. In most cases when the tape was stuck in the drive, i could retrieve the tape undamaged. But i repaired IBM, as well HP LTO drives. The HP drives were cheaper to buy, but the life span was much shorter. O yeah, and much more difficult to repair. HP is much more sensitive to dust, and heat. And is prone to produce read/write errors a lot quicker, than it's IBM counter part
@@juschu LTFS is fine _IF_ you respect its limitations and the limitations of the tape - as a way of making it easier to seek to the location of data on tape when restoring it's great. As a random access filesystem, Nuh uh.
@@juschu I usually use LTFS to dump an entire filesystem to tape in one pass. The advantage there being greatly reduced seek time if the files ever need restoring. Emphasis on "ever" as I regard tapes as last resort data recovery. This is only done on my own filesystems anyway (I only run 32TB at the moment) and for filesystems which are effectively append-only For everything else, there's Bacula - and the _single_ most common request is "can you restore XYZ directory tree I accidentally deleted 3 months ago?" (usually somwhere between "1-10" or "15-150k" files) - With its database and sha256 hashes of every file saved I know exactly on which tapes, at what location the files are and if the files themselves changed, when it happened (It's a handy IDS secondary function), so restores usually take less than 10 minutes - most of which is loading the tapes and seeking to the right block location - and the backups are held for 3-4 years. (Archival copies go to new tapes and tend only to be read when migrating to new media. Those go back around 20 years)
Very late comment, but I literally punched the tape robot this morning as it absolutely refuse to cooperate again. Well, for some reason it decided to cooperate again after I punched it, bloody masochist.
Year of 2038. Intel files for bankruptcy. Amd is cpu king. Nvidia is still trying to convince us that shadows are more important than fps. Apple releases iPhone XXll Max Linus drops his first grandchild.
Amd are losing money (massive losses) and haven’t made a profit in 10-15years. Meanwhile intel makes huge profits and has been for ages... who’s declaring bankruptcy now.
Wow, for that price it doesn't work properly on Windows because they didn't want to pay to have Microsoft sign their drivers. Amazing. What a great advertisement to use literally any other solution.
You can just purchase the drive (inside made by IBM) and insert it in a Windows / Linux tower that has 5.25 in bays, its the thunderbolt interface that is the problem here. Probably would be a lot cheaper as well.
Ilya Karyagin Checks, newegg.com.. still sell hundreds of variations with them.. Maybe you are only thinking of the desktop PCs sold in big box stores.
So you're looking at something like two months to backup petabyte project? (My math says 27ish days if you're running 24/7 and I assume that you're going to have a fair amount of down time.) Plus all the time for future backups? Seems like you should've gone with the two tape drive.
This is why autoloaders and tape library systems exist, so that the process is entirely automated. The most painful part of that is going to be the initial backup because they didn't plan for how they're going to back up the data when they started Petabyte project.
Okay Linus, I'm missing it apparently, but why on earth are you using consumer drives to backup your data? Thunderbolt?! Now how are you going to connect that? Are you putting a Mac mini in your network closet? Why not use a 1U HPE StoreEver 1/8 G2 autoloader (8 slots with 1 LTO 8 streamer means it can store 96TB before you have to change tapes) with 6Gb SAS or 8Gb fiberchannel so it can connect to a server using a standard HBA in Windows or Linux, fits in the nice rack you have, has hardware AES encryption and costs about the same.
Brad Viviviyal you would prefer to put your money on a 5 year old drive? or DVD? 10 years? I never had problems recovering LTO, and I have an old drive from ebay..
pradhuman rehal Tape storage systems aren't intended to be accessed day-to-day, or on super short notice. They're perfect for offsite backups, though, so if there's a natural disaster or a fire or something a company can still retrieve their stuff, even if their in-house backup system gets destroyed. They're also useful for information you have to keep for some reason, but don't need to access. So if you're legally required to maintain records for a certain period of time, but don't actually need to _access_ those records unless you get subpoenaed or whatever, tapes are a super cost-effective way to do it.
I work for one of the largest offsite data storage companies. I can tell you 98% of our data storage is tape. Out of the last 2%, 90% is SSD.10% is DVD. Yeah DVD... We Offer physical data storage services in secure, climate controlled vaults. We offer next day service as a standard, and offer 24 hour service (at a premium rate). It's actually quite affordable.
Oh, man alive... It'd be like running Windows 10 on a Pentium 3 computer with half a gig of RAM (if all that were even possible). In short, a snail would run faster.
7:38 is a wrong explanation. The rev down comes from the drive driving the tape forward and backward multiple times. The writing head can be moved up and down. Each time the rev down occurs, the head alters its vertical position to write a new set of data tracks (a new 'wrap') side by side to the already written ones. A more detailed description of this process can be found here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Physical_structure Though there is to say that breaks in actual files written to the tapedrive will cause it to stop too (if you wait long enough between the files), but you would not want that (start-stop-operation) to happen a lot, as it causes additional mechanical wear both to the drive and the tape. For that reason, a typical backup software targeting tapes is going to put multiple files in on archive file, as for example tar (Tape ARchive) does it.
Brad Viviviyal Tell that to IBM that still builds these drives and tape libraries, and the company makes good money at it or they wouldn't do it. ... and how about storage in the range of 8 to 695 PB? www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/ts4500/details
Doesn't Petabyte project have any free PCIe slots? you could try using a Thunderbolt 3 AiC (either low profile or with a PCIe extensor) directly in Petabyte project and *drop* the idea of having to use a Mac for this.
I'm honestly appalled by the great abundance of Mac haters in this comment section. Jesus Christ man, if you hate Macs so much then, why don't you just spend $5,500 on your _own_ fucking tape drive so you can waste it on your Windows PC?
Two things: Tape is not film. Tape storage like the one shown in this video is digital. That's why they have such high capacity and is part of the reason they are robust enough for enterprise data backup. You know VCR? There was a digital variant called DVHS that was digital and could store up to 25GBs per tape.
@@forestnfren8146 Not really splitting hairs here, just pointing out that it's not analogue vs digital, as your comment seemed to be suggesting. Yeah, it is ironic that we're replacing things with solid state (electrons and whatnot), only to revert to relatively less advanced mediums (pits in plastic, rust on plastic film, etc) for things that matter. I still use optical media for important backups, even though I have SSDs and spinning rust. Methinks it's also ironic that DVHS could hold up to 50GB of data, but was replaced by DVD, which had a much smaller capacity.
We support several large companies who use tape backups in addition to tradItional SAN storage. The trick is using software like Veeam to connect your server the tape system is attached to to the data you’re backing up. It works extremely well assuming you know it’s strengths and weaknesses. Our clients take monthly and weekly data snapshots to tape and nightly/hourly incremental snapshots to SAN. 99% of data restore jobs are from within a day or two so those restore jobs are really quick and painless vs having to drive to the clients off site storage locker to grab whatever tape is needed and go through that mess.
You do not want to rely on employees remembering to swap the tape every day as your backup solution. Since you have that 10GB connection to the local datacenters, colocate a small server with a tape library off-site and stock it with a little over a petabyte's worth of tapes. You keep everything backed up and safe with minimal reliance on people.
Doc Ferringer they don’t need to be changed daily, I would think it would be much longer than that. Excluding the days of catching up that is, and those can be managed by Linus himself and verified by himself.
It's basically just a method to combine files, like what ZIP is doing, but without the compression. There's no need to use it with tapes, it was used a lot, but like Linus says; you just put files on it like you want. I wouldn't recommend TAR as it has no added benefit at all, but WinRAR can read these files anyway.
Hardly, Mac's can use it. Windows using Linux on Windows can use it... oh and anyone who uses 7zip can use them. Tar's are also used extensively if you do any kind of Java based development since tarballs are the underlying structure of a war file .
Surely the benefit of tar is compression is optional and it turns the entire filesystem into a single contiguous file, resulting in minimal spindle spindown and maximising transfer speeds.
Actually, track tape storage drives came out in 1951 with UNIVAC when drives relied on vacuum tubes. In 1970 HP (7970E) made reel tape drives that could be used for personal computing, if a person could afford it. Floppies were not the first type of storage, even for personal computing.
I think you should make an episode discussing the pros & cons of different back-up & archival methods like opticals vs. tapes vs. hdd; etc... I still personally go for opticals due to their longevity CDs, DVDs, BDs can last up to 60 years if kept properly.
Opticals R not longer lasting than drives, generally speaking. The dyes degrade & so on. Drives U must research & some types basically last 4ever, though nothing is perfect! Any drive that spins faster than 5400RPM is basically unreliable trash & U can never depend on them, because they get 2 hot, etc. A quick check on the PC I'm using right now some of the drives have over 80,000 hours on them & no problems, including 'SMART' check =)
No, you can't boot from this device, unless you're ready to do some serious scripting and modifications. Those og PC's which used tubes and tapes were obviously designed to boot this way, while modern ones off of solid mediums. It's hard to just switch back and forth.
1:57 Recordable blu-ray disks now can actually store up to 100 GB (25 US dollar per disk). However, 50 GB disks are only 2.65 each. That is 53 US dollar per TB. So for 25,000 $ you could backup 470 TB on high quality disks that last for approx 50 to 100 years. There also exists M-Disc, which lasts up to a 1000 years, however it's 2 times as expensive. The advantage of optical media is ofcourse the way quicker writing time, and the fast 'n easy way to access individual files. Note: the mentioned pricing is including VAT, so it would be even cheaper for the LMG.
Huh… I believe you could actually, massively improve read/write speed performance for random memory access, by either: A) Make the magnetic ribbon *much* wider, to turn it into basically a magnetic scroll, and put many tracks along the width of the scroll that the read/write head can slide over to. B) Pack a cartridge with a large number of small tapes reels, which can be accessed with either their own read/write head, or a single read/write head that uses an XY table or something, to move to the individual reels in 2 dimensions.
well, the TAR command started as the command to control tape drives. Just later it became default to store files in a "tar ball", which is essentially a tape in the form of a file archive. A "tar ball"/"tar file" is basically an IMAGE of a TAPE! Like an ISO is an image of a CDROM/DVDROM! The structural difference of a TAR and an ISO is that a TAR is made so you can extract and archive individual files in it, independently of a file system (as the TAPE). An ISO stores actual partitions and filesystems in it, so it's hard to extract files without mounting the ISO. In a TAR/TAPE, you don't need a filesystem... just store files and extract! So, in the old days (and you can still do it today in Linux with LTO), when you add a file to a tape, you would use TAR to do that... If you need to retrieve a file, you just run "tar --extract /dev/st0 ", and it will retrieve JUST the file for you, since the tape ACTUALLY IS the "tar ball" itself. You don't have to retrieve the whole image of the tape to extract something from it. The tape drive you showed actually is just using LTFS, which is an open source standard, initially developed by IBM, to "format" a tape using 2 partitions, one to store the INDEX of files at the begining of the TAPE, and the second for the actual data. You can use the same LTFS with ANY LTO in Linux today (that's actually how we backup data at the studio I work for). We actually got an $1500 LTO7 drive off ebay and put it in one of our servers (5,25", like a cdrom! pretty neat). We just needed an SAS board with proper scsi rom to operate it (those LSI Megraids don't have proper SCSI subset of commands). It actually shows up in linux as a Tape device "automagically". Install LTFS, format and mount the TAPE and voila, a drive to write stuff! I still use mt-st commands (yep, the same from the 70's) to rewind, eject and load a tape though... And if I want to use TAR to store files, I still can.. works fine! LOL But LTFS saves a lot of trouble and it's just easy to use! Be carefull though... LTFS has a LIMITED size for its first partition (where it stores it's the file index or its "FAT"), and the only way to free up space is to re-format. (the same goes to the deleted data actually). LTFS doens't handle fragmentation, so you actually CAN'T keep writing/deleting/writing again... you'll notice that when you delete something (unless is the LAST file you wrote to the tape), it DOESN'T free up space! my 2 cents!! enjoy your new LTO! :)
Typically for a similar operation to what Linus is doing, two copies of the tape will be made. In our case, all of our even numbered tapes are the main ones and the odd number tapes are the backup which are then stored off-site. The tapes probably don't have to be stored in a temp/ humidity controlled area unless they are going to be kept there for decades. Usually, after 10-15 years, the data (if still needed) will be updated to the latest generation tapes to ensure data safety. But this is an ideal situation.
Really nice to see how it works behind the scenes as I work with this particular stuff at work, but from enterprise OS point of view :D... Thanks Linus
It's different when it is in the Enterprise, that is considered cheap when a new server has a hefty price tag of $25,000 for a HP proliant server., $5000 is nothing. Especially when the data on the server is worth more than the server itself. This is the Enterprise market not the consumer market
Watching Linus listening to the tape drive, gave me flashbacks to my BBS days when my files were archived / rosemail / fidonet on my wildcat board in Ontario. We used a SCSI Seagate tape drive (don't remember the tape size) but the server was a blistering 10 Mhz 286, with a 2 partition 40 meg HD, with dos 3 you could only partition to 30 meg I think, so that's why we had the tape drive.
So how exactly is this particular desktop solution inferior? And it's only cost effective if you have the space and are willing to incur the operations cost of that QSi6. At a starting price of $7500, sans drive(www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=quantum+scalar+i6)(it'll handle up to 3 btw) a space requirement of 6U rack(10.4"x17.4"x36.4 per spec sheet(www.quantum.com/en/products/tape-storage/scalar-i6/)) and a weight of 92 lbs, unloaded. And then you have slot licensing. Which comes in 25 slot increments. the unit on ebay comes with 50 slots, which is half the capacity so you'd have to buy two more licenses to get the full capacity. Didn't find any specifics on whether those licenses are yearly or in perpetuity. the 24 PB model you mention is 1 contol unit with 7 Expansion units. the expansion units start at 7000 as well, but come with no slot license. that's also filling a 48U(7 ft tall) rack. Unless you're dealing with a large data center, and you don't need any kind of portability, then the QSi6 can be a better solution. For a desktop solution, this one's not bad, price wise(if you bother just to look up prices on amazon or newegg), compared to other solutions. Every other one i found doesn't include a 3.5" hot swap tray, this one does, or any thunderbolt connections, they are just a desktop drive.
As long as you store the tapes off-site, somewhere fireproof ideally. The old World Trade Center 1's Tape backups were stored in the other tower and that proved to be, well, unwise.
To answer the question you ask right before the logo, it is because you need things to be stored offsite from your equipment, for "security" (e.g. NOT onsite for a break in to steal private data for whatever purpose) and safety of the media (E.g. NOT burning up when the building goes up in flames). Tape backup is a great solution though. I do however think that 150TB of storage would be hard for a home user to hit, so tape backup is only for people who are really serious about their data usage.
Imo you should be using a tape drive in a server with something like data protector which will let you schedule backups and do disaster recovery and store once and stuff
@Vinny0 Not really, both have them same base, Unix, but one is BSD and one is Linux. Also, for that purpose, you'd most likely use a server that handles file transfer with a remote interface
Back in my CIO days (2-3 yr ago), I implemented an LTO enclosure with 8 drives for LTO to backup all stored data on the 150TB NAS, I used "Symantec backup exec" to make a full backup daily, 1 differential every hour, so, when someone made a mistake on a file, I just rollback the file and done, we made special weekly backups that were stored off-site in case of a dissasster or a complete loss, so, the tape backup is not as dead as we thought
0:41 Ladies and gentlemen the CEO of the company
please send help
My CEO is 82 years old... Yeah
I'm subscribed to the right channel
-Darkness Intensifies
He still will fire your ass with no hesitation
all i can imagine is the editor sitting there thinking "This guy pays my bills."
3:31 the upper-left corner of the screen says "Linus Tip Techs"
MrCatFace 8885 lmfao
I think "drop files here" is way better for Linus 😂
Libus top tips
XDDDDDD
Tip Tech lmao
This legit reminds me of my tech class I took in high school. We had recently gotten an old tape drive from my old middle school and we were all messing around with it moving all the tapes around and after about 5 minuets of goofing with it, we fried the entire system and then realized that it was still worth $2,000 bucks on eBay.
As an editor in the UK, LTO is the one of best long time archiving solutions around at the moment. I use it every day for backing up and restoring media and projects and it's been very robust over a long period. The migration issues exists but as long as you don't massively up your backup requirements, earlier versions of LTO with smaller capacities do just fine. Another system to check out Linus is ODA, although I'm not sure it's still in production.
ONE BIG WARNING - LTO6 tapes ARE NOT READABLE/WRITEABLE in LTO7 drives. This breaks the "2 generations" rule and is because older MP tape will destroy the heads on LTO7 and upwards drives in short order and is going to make migration harder for established tape-based setups like mine (I have several thousand tapes and we normally age out over a couple of rotations)
WRT "older LTO versions" - beware of drives going out of production.
I've had far too many instances of people showing up with long-obsolete tapes asking if they can be restored. The answer is usually yes, but at steep costs via external vendors (7-track open reel 70s stuff is about £250 per reel, QIC80 about £100/tape, so it'd better be justifiable)
Where can I get an LTO-7 tape drive, and tapes?
ODA Sony Optical Disc Archive has been scaled up to 5.5TB soon to 12TB a cartrage optical is great but god the readers are even more pricey.
@@TheRealHarrypmNope, ODA is discontinued now.
7:50 That would explain the tar concept; writing one long file means no slowing down at breaks, so it'd be quicker.
I think it was to make the tape drive work *at all*. Normal filesystems don't work on tapes!
@@thewhitefalcon8539 correct, up to LTO 4, tapes could only store a bitstream. LTO 5 added the partitioning needed to write a file table, and LTFS was born. You still lose about 100GB of capacity that it cordons off for the file table. This happens because data on tape is written in shingled bands down the width of the tape called “wraps”. You can’t write to an earlier wrap without risking overwriting the wrap in front of it, so LTFS sections off a big chunk of tape for the file table. It also will never overwrite old data or parts of the file table for this reason. That’s nice, because you can recover old versions of the files/filesystem on the tape, but it comes at the cost of using up tape space for old files.
Since tape should only be used for backup and archiving, and since LTO 5 is 1.25 TB (and each gen roughly doubles from there), the drawbacks of LTFS rarely come up. If the tape fills up with old data, you can always wipe the tape and start over. After all, that tape had better not be your only copy of that data.
Nice to see some LTO/enterprise level stuff! I'm in the film industry and we use these things all the time. You forgot the best part of tape though, you can physically lock the tape to read only so people can't overwrite it later.
Is this a permanent thing or is this toggle-able like the read-only switch found on floppy disks?
@@onceuponaban it's just a red tab that you can physically slide back and forth to lock or unlock.
I too work in the film industry, and posted a question about some LTFS commands on a forum the other day. Got no answers, only people saying "lol its 2018 who uses tape." So I'm happy to see there's at least one other person out there who knows what's up!
james brill not entirely true, you can purchase WORM drives (cool name right) basically Write Once Read Many. I've used that for Government work for compliance
Err, they are as secure as SD card write switches. A trivial firmware mod would do the trick without any reasonably visible effects...
150 TB of Porn storage, underwear sponsorship, and Linus attempting to lewd us with a product demonstration. I'm subscribed to the right channel.
yep
Words more true, have never been spoken.
Very much yes
SMGJohn just 20TB you dear sir are not dedicated enough :P I have that much ecchi anime let alone hentai, seinen, shoujo, and related kodomo.
@@Amokra get a life
Watching this video again after your most recent data loss wondering why you didn't do an offsite backup with your tapes...
Or onsite!
They never got to it, I guess.
They said the data wasn't that important.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 would kinda destroy the propose tho
@@shrimpypyeah but most data loss will be from random drive failure or electrical issues.
An entire building burning down in order to destroy the tapes is far less common.
*WAVES MAGNET AROUND THREATENINGLY*
LMAO! Hold the tapes hostage. Ransom them off with all of Linus' 2080, 2080ti, 1080 and 1080ti's.
PUT THE GRAPHICS CARDS IN THE BAG LINUS!
WolfGangMouse No cops or the tapes gets magnetized...Haha!
LOL
Store them in a safe with a high power electricity line running in the wall behind.....
There's a story somewhere of an IT guy meticulously archiving data to neatly labeled and organized tape cassettes, only to find out all of the tapes were blank when they tried to find an old file.
TEST YOUR BACKUPS REGULARLY
Kord Martin isn’t that the point of verification?
Why would he skip that process?
I think I remember hearing similar. Had something to do with them locking the tapes in a vault nightly, and the magnetic locks essentially erasing the tapes when doing so.
Conundrum191 oAHAHHA!!! 😂💀💀
Agreed. That's what good scripts are designed to help with.
That's right! No excuses today as VM environments let you test your backup and recovery procedures safely without affecting production servers and data. All systems should have documented backup and recovery procedures for Operating Systems, data and applications.
Yep, tape is actually industry standard for archiving and has been for some time now. It's essentially the backup of your backups, anyone who works professionally knows the importance of this.
yeah IIRC even simple vhs's were expected to last 30 years so I can imagine tapes min-maxed to store data can go a lot longer.
The problem with that 40 year tape life is that while the media may last that long, the drives may not, and as you pointed out, there is only 1-2 generations of backwards compatibility. Which means having to move tape contents each generation or risk not being able to access it in the future because you no longer have a drive that will read it.
For super long term archiving you can pay a company like Iron Mountain to come pick up tapes and store them in their "vaults".
epicjoe
Another dead Chanel
I'm a sub.. didn't expect to see you here
so many subs so little views
I can't wait for you to show me how you can double my storage for free!
I am curious, why not buy a small robot loader instead of the single drive? was it for the thunderbolt? A Overland T24 with LTO-8 drive stores 24 tapes, can be driven by excellent software like Archiware, and you dont have to baby the tapes every day. Just load up blanks, give it a schedule and forget about it, for slightly more than you paid.
This ow so this! Plus changes can be backed up not just the whole library.
I would watch that twice.
Yea, the standalone units make no sense. SAS autoloaders cost ~10% more and have 24 or more slots.
Happy to see LTFS and LTO finally arrived at LTT, unfortunately they choose the "fancy" way (guess thunderbolt was the buzzword).
A library and a proper archiving SW would make a more professional approach....
Exactly. A 2 drive system (I use HPE in my shop) like the MSL 2024 is $2500, and 2 x LTO8 drives for is are another $9k. That gives upwards of 2TB an hour of write performance if you're using both drives, and over 250TB of storage uncompressed in the chassis.
15 hours to back up 4TB of data is insanely slow on LTO8. My quick calculations show that's running at 75MB/s, or 1/4 speed for LTO8, or 0.25TB/Hour. At around triple the cost you can backup 10x faster, have the entire PB backed up in about 3 weeks, and with that speed and cost per TB you can double up your storage for secondary archival storage offsite.
At 24x7 backup on their current system, they're looking at 160 days to backup a full 1PB. Realistically? Call it a year with the time taken for verifying and failed backups.
3 words Linus: SAS Tape RAID! That's the way to go!
We need more likes !!!!
Hello fellow nerd!
Or IT guy.
@@HistoricaHungarica hello
@RockitMan2001 - * cough * D2D2T * cough *
Hells yeah. I had a 4 drive library years ago on fibre channel. Backups went almost as fast as copying from array to array.
I was very much surprised the company I work for was using Tape for backup's, I wasn't really in the Data Backup space before so just assumed everything was on disk. But someone had the smart idea so now they are going the Cloud route even though we technically speaking were our own cloud storage. Which is pretty helpful when restoring a 50gb folder takes hours now instead of minutes.
'Cloud' is 'just somebody else's computer', running drives or whatever =)) No 'magical reliability sauce' with that LOL U can bet there is some 'fine print' in all those 'cloud backup' contracts that if the restore fails they 'are not liable' 2 refund U N E of that $ U kept paying them, as in, who knows if they R ever really storing N E of your $hit @ all LOL
Why is the Mac screen still taped?
Linus, You done goofed while putting it back together didn't you
+1
I would say it's an old video, but as we know Linus... Wouldn't surprise me if they bricked it again trying to madscience the shit out of it.
According to his watch at 7:12, it was filmed on Monday, Sept. 10th.
Double sided tape doesn't "dry".
Probably for another video about their broken Mac, just for the lols
3:35, we've found their secret channel... Linus Tip Techs.
👀👌🏼💯
lol
I've been considering tape storage for a while. The initial drive cost is expensive, but it makes the most sense for long-term archive.
Amazon Glacier prolly would make more sense for you
Brad Viviviyal There is a reason why tape is still used in enterprise environments. Blu ray discs are not a good solution as you need a SHIT ton of them to make up 1 tape
Ted Stranix Why it would make sense? The year price of storing a 12 TB tape is north of $600. Then comes the price of retrieving the data. Not cheaper by any means. A LTO-8 tape costs like $225, less in bulk.
Tape has always been archival quality. A disc in storage? A bit (pun intended) of oxygen leakage will corrode the surface storage media rendering the data useless...
Brad Viviviyal tapes start making sense when you get into the PB territory
2018 - I'm wearing Mack Weldon
2019 - I'm wearing LTT underwear - order now!
Linus's ultimate goal is for his data to be on every storage device ever made
Not every type, every drive
In about 2 years he might buy 15 more of these tape writers, hire a person whose job is exclusively to manage them, rent a climate controlled storage unit to put the tapes in (with an optic fibre cable between it and the studio obviously) and upgrade to 16k footage which literally only he will be able to watch.
Uh, he might wnat to build a really big warehouse in that case... just for the floppy disks... the big ones :D
A warehouse with little robots driving around with server trays filled with tape drives, forklifts for the really high racks, the whole deal.
Throw in an amazon drone for no reason as well.
*That's a lot of data*
But is it a lot of damage
In a boat lol
*How about a little more?*
*maniacal laughter*
Use flextape for storage
That's a lot of porn
All the US national laboratories use tape storage for data sets and archive of computer code. Just too much for other avenues. I've been on experiments that store a couple terabytes of data per week. Large experiments can range into the terabytes per day. There is a mass storage stub file that is stored on a "regular" server which acts like the directory listing for all the stored files. It contains the soft link to the actual file and data such as the size of the file. When we need to analyze a data set we first request the data file be "cached" to a set of write-through servers. Once the file is cached, then the analysis program is feed to the auger system which distributes the analysis job to the farm machines. If one is clever this can be done all with scripts that are nearly automated. I'm only 1/2 clever.
Yesater Day : I bet. I do research at Jefferson Lab in Virginia. Their tape system is small in comparison and it is still impressive. It is also the only room on site that has more safety interlocks than the accelerator. I guess they don't want a graduate student in there.
The software Linus is featuring is based on LTFS , a self describing tape format, which allows browsing on the tape.
Usually take archiving is based on automated database driven software, which holds an index of where the file is stored on tape, when recovering data than there is a special client which triggers the procedure (moving, loading, reading) depending of the size of the library this of course takes some time...
@@phprofYT I go to CNU by Jlab. Are you a professor here? I'd love to see pictures of the tape system. (I'm a Computer Engineering student).
D0T3XE : I'm a professor a bit farther north (~1000 miles). I don't have any pictures of the computer center and currently can't find any on JLab's website. It might be possible for you or a group from CNU to visit with the IT personnel at Jefferson Lab if you have an interest in the application of HPC and mass storage. Computer Engineering, eh? Good stuff. A friend of ours has a daughter in that area. Looks like fun.
@@phprofYT Right on. I'll have to ask my Physics Professor or my advisor if they know anything about it/or have photos. Both do research at JLab currently.
2:04 Mini-Linus at bottom center dropping the disc.
Lol
Linus Minus
When I did work experience at school, back in 1994 I think, I worked for 2 weeks at IBM North Harbour.
They had a subsidised cafe, you could have those fancy chocolate ice creams with your lunch. It was my dream job, computers and ice cream.
For 2 days I did the job of that tape robot.
The washing machines would request a take number and you had to go find it. Somebody would request data and they had to wait for me to find it from the library and load it in.
Now that's LATENCY!! 8@
You also had to file the used tapes back in the correct slot, put redundant tapes into the scratch bin and load blank tapes from the scratch ready rack.
The data was processed by ES9000s.
They were so fast, they no longer used MFLOPS, but GFLOPS!!!
They were liquid cooled monsters the size of shipping containers.
I last saw people doing EXACTLY THE SAME JOB in 2010 in New York state somewhere. German Town or Tarrytown or something.
Yup. Anyone workin in a datacenter knows these things in and out. Also all the bugs and annoyances with them. They are incredibly efficient and almost used by every company here in germany.(psst. Also the German Bundeswehr) especially since you're legally bound to backup all data for 10 years.
Not really serious til you get a robotic loader.
Let's hope the drives are more reliable than their helicopters.
ei ei immer diese Deutschen
die Bundeswehr wasss
Btw. Companys pay stupid high amounts of money for 10 minutes of labor changing tapes everyday at colocation datacenters.
a $5500 tape drive without rgb?
unsubbed.
LOL
But you can add your own rgb and call it a fully customizable tape drive :(
@@OhSoTiredMan If you pay that much then it should come factory equipped.
Lol jk
XXX collection.
its enterprise you fucktard
Back in the 90ths I spent about 2000 Bucks for a 2GB DDS drive, writing speed maximum 1 MB/s, so this one sounds like a plain bargain to me :-)
I imagine someone saying the same in future. And i wonder how much capacity and speed will they be having at that time?
Finian Blackett Tapes are not ridiculously slow - they're significantly _faster_ than _all_ mechanical drives and outrun most SSDs on sustained activity.
Where they lose out is on random access and price.
A good (small) robot with 80 tape slots will set you back $9-12k, and LTO7 drives to go in it will be $12-15k apiece. LTO8 drives are currently around the $20k apiece mark, more if you want dual port (and you _do_ want dual port)
If you want something like a floorstanding 500 slot unit with 5 LTO7 FC drives in it, then don't expect change from $150k-$200k and you can expect to spend $20k on the _hardware_ of a backup system to drive it, simply to keep up with the drives - and don't bother unless you have 10Gb/s + 100Gb/s core infrastructure, else you're going to get choked by network congestion regularly.
For the cost of a drive, there's no point in using tape unless you need to backup at least 20-40TB and once you hit those levels you don't want to be feeding drives by hand unless you have _very_ cheap labour and a death wish for your drives, so a robot is the default choice.
Oh the ninethies. Good times.
@@tf2excession This is actually the fastest AND slowest storage you can get. Fastest in write throughput, slowest in single file retrieval. I haven't seen a better backup/archival solution. Cheapest price per GB and very reliable. Older LTO-generations are very affordable.
@@ThatPianoNoob you mean the ninetieths?
$5,500 tape deck 25 cents worth of tape to hold computer together The way Linus thinks priceless XD
i don't think a tape that can store 12 terabytes of data costs 25 cents to make...
oh, thought he was talking about the backup tapes for a second
xtremeguy2256 Correct, a 12TB tape would run you about 230$
Wait if a 12 tb tape is $230 why not just backup on hardrives... Espically because it's ALOT cheaper and faster.
@@payne7473 because it wont make ad revenue...
LINUS TECH TAPES 😂
LinusTapeTips
LinusSexTapes
@Siddharth Kapoor LinusFapTapes
Siddharth Kapoor LMAO
Linus Tape Drives
During one of your videos I was internally screaming to myself, "TAPE STORAGE!" entirely based on an article I read a while ago. It had to do with google loosing some 44,000 accounts worth of emails due to some software failure that caused them to be deleted across several backup servers, but they were all recovered over the course of a few days due to the tape backups. It makes sense. As long as nobody tosses a magnet in their general direction, your data is safely off the internet and can serve as a geo backup. Run the backup automatically every night, swapping out tapes when they fill up and removing them from the location manually, or have them back up over the internet to a different location where you do the same. That way you still have the fast access from the storinator, plus off site backups that are safe from hackers.
And what is a CPU?
I love tape, you can do some fun stuff. On one of my first trashcan workstations, I booted my OS (slackware) from a work salvage DLT tape drive into RAM, and wrote changes to tape on shutdown. Sure, it took 30 mins to boot and 30 mins to shut down, and when I wanted to access files outside of the 1GB of RAM that I had available to load data into, it was a serious chore, but I loved the system at the time because 100GB HDDs where hundreds of dollars, and I could add 100GB for somwhere around $50, plus the drive was free. Took forever to make the modifications to the bootloader and kernel to make it work though.
now that sounds like a fun time xD
could you have added a few GB HDD for booting from?
Slow State Drive
I bought a bluray Burner in 2011. Guess how many blurays I have burnt lol
I would guess... similar to the upvote count on your comment?
@@jonragnarsson way more up votes actually XD
I do all my backups to dual-layer Blu-rays and it works for me. I used to backup to DVDs a long time ago and use the same drive to access old backups occasionally. I also backup to the cloud, using 7-Zip to make that manageable. I also use a RAID 1 configuration for my main drive(s) and use external hard drives for automatic backups with Allway Sync.
@@LifeboatFoundation and here I am no backups and all my hdd's are like 8 years old. This will be my year for new storage. I did try and figure out how to put my bluray Burner in my newest system but honestly there is no way to make a Corsair 570x look good and clean with an ODD in it.
@@JohnyKnox "bluray Burner in my newest system but honestly there is no way to make a Corsair 570x look good and clean with an ODD in it." It isn't easy to find a case that has good support for 5.25" internal drives, you could go with a 5.25" external drive. My case is the Corsair Obsidian 750D Full-Tower Case - Airflow Edition and I rock two Blu-ray drives in it and it has space for 3. You can see the case at amzn.to/2H5nDnE
I'm sure a lot of people find tape archiving surprising and/or hilarious, but it's standard in studios and creative agencies and has been for years.
> Local server sync to offsite server 'mirror', which makes daily/biweekly/weekly/monthly whole-server (or 'changes') backups/archive. Getting something from a backup was a PITA though, had to specify close to root level folders and get the whole lot, and what date you want the backup from which could take around a day to deploy on to your local server. These kinds of redundancies sound expensive, but once a studio or agency gets past 20 people or so, it starts making A LOT of sense.
8:48 my door made it into Linus' voice
His voice does nearly to get to EEVblog ranges sometimes....
I repaired tape drives for over more than 11.5 years.
Hand me this IBM-LTO-8, i fix this baby.
I miss my old company (Sprague Europe) 😢
@@juschu You are quite right.
I removed many tapes that did not want to eject.
Sometimes the costumer tried to get the tape back himself, destroying it in the process.
In most cases when the tape was stuck in the drive, i could retrieve the tape undamaged.
But i repaired IBM, as well HP LTO drives.
The HP drives were cheaper to buy, but the life span was much shorter.
O yeah, and much more difficult to repair.
HP is much more sensitive to dust, and heat.
And is prone to produce read/write errors a lot quicker, than it's IBM counter part
@@juschu LTFS is fine _IF_ you respect its limitations and the limitations of the tape - as a way of making it easier to seek to the location of data on tape when restoring it's great. As a random access filesystem, Nuh uh.
@@juschu I usually use LTFS to dump an entire filesystem to tape in one pass. The advantage there being greatly reduced seek time if the files ever need restoring. Emphasis on "ever" as I regard tapes as last resort data recovery. This is only done on my own filesystems anyway (I only run 32TB at the moment) and for filesystems which are effectively append-only
For everything else, there's Bacula - and the _single_ most common request is "can you restore XYZ directory tree I accidentally deleted 3 months ago?" (usually somwhere between "1-10" or "15-150k" files) - With its database and sha256 hashes of every file saved I know exactly on which tapes, at what location the files are and if the files themselves changed, when it happened (It's a handy IDS secondary function), so restores usually take less than 10 minutes - most of which is loading the tapes and seeking to the right block location - and the backups are held for 3-4 years. (Archival copies go to new tapes and tend only to be read when migrating to new media. Those go back around 20 years)
Those damn tape library robots were so janky, half the time you'd find it jammed in the morning >:(
Very late comment, but I literally punched the tape robot this morning as it absolutely refuse to cooperate again.
Well, for some reason it decided to cooperate again after I punched it, bloody masochist.
Year of 2038.
Intel files for bankruptcy.
Amd is cpu king.
Nvidia is still trying to convince us that shadows are more important than fps.
Apple releases iPhone XXll Max
Linus drops his first grandchild.
Dejavu.... Someone made this comment a few video back...
lol you forgot amd quits gpu making to move to portal making instead for dimensional travel
@@GothicDragonX, really?
Amd are losing money (massive losses) and haven’t made a profit in 10-15years. Meanwhile intel makes huge profits and has been for ages... who’s declaring bankruptcy now.
LOL
The fact that Dennis shook his head so much and the buds stayed put is a good selling point
He might just have really sticky external ear canals
If I'd shake my head that hard I would get my neck hurt. It's very probably fastforwarded a little to look more funny.
did i see Dennis pouring acetone in his ears after that commercial? ;-)
Wow, for that price it doesn't work properly on Windows because they didn't want to pay to have Microsoft sign their drivers. Amazing. What a great advertisement to use literally any other solution.
Basically.
Tape doesn't have to be bad - but THIS tape solution seems to be bad.
Whoa it's my boi des! Didn't expect to find you here. Lol.
You can just purchase the drive (inside made by IBM) and insert it in a Windows / Linux tower that has 5.25 in bays, its the thunderbolt interface that is the problem here. Probably would be a lot cheaper as well.
Modern towers has no any 5.25 bays.
Ilya Karyagin Checks, newegg.com.. still sell hundreds of variations with them.. Maybe you are only thinking of the desktop PCs sold in big box stores.
Spoiler: they didn't
So you're looking at something like two months to backup petabyte project? (My math says 27ish days if you're running 24/7 and I assume that you're going to have a fair amount of down time.) Plus all the time for future backups?
Seems like you should've gone with the two tape drive.
This is why autoloaders and tape library systems exist, so that the process is entirely automated.
The most painful part of that is going to be the initial backup because they didn't plan for how they're going to back up the data when they started Petabyte project.
Okay Linus, I'm missing it apparently, but why on earth are you using consumer drives to backup your data? Thunderbolt?! Now how are you going to connect that? Are you putting a Mac mini in your network closet?
Why not use a 1U HPE StoreEver 1/8 G2 autoloader (8 slots with 1 LTO 8 streamer means it can store 96TB before you have to change tapes) with 6Gb SAS or 8Gb fiberchannel so it can connect to a server using a standard HBA in Windows or Linux, fits in the nice rack you have, has hardware AES encryption and costs about the same.
because he got this one for free. he probably asked HP and IBM for a freebie and they told him to piss off.
I know man, I know.
I love you are worried about using a mac and not a tape player in 2018.
You haven't had any enterprise IT experience have you?
r/whooosh
Amazing that tape is still useful for electronic applications.
The VHS might be dead, but it seems that tape has found its new purpose in life.
That's always been tape's purpose tho
Tape was used for storing computer data long before VHS even existed
More proof that the 80's is alive and well.
Smart choice. Tape is really underrated
It is underrated for a certain reason, its not very practical in day to day use.
Brad Viviviyal you would prefer to put your money on a 5 year old drive? or DVD? 10 years? I never had problems recovering LTO, and I have an old drive from ebay..
@@PradhumanRehal Well you don't use backups in day to day use.
pradhuman rehal Tape storage systems aren't intended to be accessed day-to-day, or on super short notice. They're perfect for offsite backups, though, so if there's a natural disaster or a fire or something a company can still retrieve their stuff, even if their in-house backup system gets destroyed.
They're also useful for information you have to keep for some reason, but don't need to access. So if you're legally required to maintain records for a certain period of time, but don't actually need to _access_ those records unless you get subpoenaed or whatever, tapes are a super cost-effective way to do it.
nomsky or just have a proper cloud based backup solution aka AWS
Could've.... should've... but didn't do it anyway. RIP data on ZFS :D
0:20 those are actually Yvonne's hands
Three things to put on a checklist for tape storage. Backup rotation, archive routine (different from backups) and off-site storage.
I work for one of the largest offsite data storage companies. I can tell you 98% of our data storage is tape. Out of the last 2%, 90% is SSD.10% is DVD. Yeah DVD... We Offer physical data storage services in secure, climate controlled vaults. We offer next day service as a standard, and offer 24 hour service (at a premium rate). It's actually quite affordable.
Literally anyone who works in IT uses tapes in some form
@@farguc yup - even if thats Amazon Glacier, thats all tape..
I need this to store memes before they become entirely illegal in europe
youre dumb, read the act and then speak
Woooosh
chocolate boy
r/woosh
Maxatal This isn't a woosh moment- a lot of people believe that is what the EU is actually doing.
@@thursdaythought7201 it's amazing what a little propoganda will do isn't it?
Install windows to a tape drive
druaga1 :eyes:
Didn't somebody already do this with a USB stick ??
Oh, man alive... It'd be like running Windows 10 on a Pentium 3 computer with half a gig of RAM (if all that were even possible).
In short, a snail would run faster.
It is not possible since you can't boot from it neither access the files directly from explorer... Sorry to bring bad news
4k random: 0.00000001 mb/s
7:38 is a wrong explanation. The rev down comes from the drive driving the tape forward and backward multiple times. The writing head can be moved up and down. Each time the rev down occurs, the head alters its vertical position to write a new set of data tracks (a new 'wrap') side by side to the already written ones.
A more detailed description of this process can be found here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Physical_structure
Though there is to say that breaks in actual files written to the tapedrive will cause it to stop too (if you wait long enough between the files), but you would not want that (start-stop-operation) to happen a lot, as it causes additional mechanical wear both to the drive and the tape. For that reason, a typical backup software targeting tapes is going to put multiple files in on archive file, as for example tar (Tape ARchive) does it.
It's sad Linus didn't drop the $5,499 tape drive and we didn't watch him suffer while making livestream about repairing it.
Petabyte Project = PP
*Theres no PP left for this move!*
*Linus intensifies*
Click the circles
Missing the circle *CAP LOCKS CRY* UHSDFUFIGSDOFIHSDOIFHOSIDUFHUOSDHFIOUSDHFU9ZEIQHEFC98ZQEYZSEJHBFOIZAQDHCOISDFHCS9D8FHJOIZEHFOIZE
pp (very soft)
@@LiEnby o s u u u u
Last time I was this early Linus still had his balls
The only Linus that ever had balls (and still does) is Linus Torvalds.
Ass Whole, oh boy do I have some news for you!
@@AssWhole-u6d does he though..?
He still has His balls, He Just Cut Off the transportation line of the White gold from the eggs to the prostate
Yeah, he has a pretty healthy sac, search for this video 'Linus Torvalds: Nvidia' watch the 40 second clip.
Tape storage one of my favorite Nostalgic forms of storage.
Get a tape library it will do everything you want
I had one with 24 tapes and auto cleaning it worked just like that but a phat storage device
Brad Viviviyal I work as a backup engineer in a huge enterprise environment.. we use tapes and tape libraries
Brad Viviviyal Tell that to IBM that still builds these drives and tape libraries, and the company makes good money at it or they wouldn't do it. ... and how about storage in the range of 8 to 695 PB? www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/ts4500/details
All enterprise storage is done with auto-loader tape machines --- been like that for 20+ years and will continue for a long time
Brad Viviviyal Did you even see the start of the video?
Brad Viviviyal so where do banks, inssurances and medical archive their data then, please enlighten us, thank you
This is just a series with no name. The quest for storage backups!
Next stop! NAS review!
02:05 Every 90s kid into tech has a stack of unused optical media to back up and burn those files they never got around to doing...
I'm stuck with 3 unused 50 disc stacks lol. 50 CD-RWs, 50 DVD-RWs and 50 Double layer DVD-RW. they probably don't even work anymore.
so many files lost. becouse of time spend playing Unreal Tournament. and not backing up important documents ( music movies and games )
@@megapro125 I need some of those for some super old computers, cu for some unknown reason they can't fully boot my USB, and slow
7:29 the face of pure joy... he looks prouder than any new father
Doesn't Petabyte project have any free PCIe slots? you could try using a Thunderbolt 3 AiC (either low profile or with a PCIe extensor) directly in Petabyte project and *drop* the idea of having to use a Mac for this.
Benito Llan Matos
I'm honestly appalled by the great abundance of Mac haters in this comment section. Jesus Christ man, if you hate Macs so much then, why don't you just spend $5,500 on your _own_ fucking tape drive so you can waste it on your Windows PC?
"Yo Linus didnt you see my Titan Xp somewhere?"
"Yea seems its been casually laying on my desk for days, sorry m8"
Disappointed in you Linus, you failed to mention:
The irony of digital media replacing film; all to have the content ultimately stored on film
Two things:
Tape is not film.
Tape storage like the one shown in this video is digital. That's why they have such high capacity and is part of the reason they are robust enough for enterprise data backup. You know VCR? There was a digital variant called DVHS that was digital and could store up to 25GBs per tape.
@@tomhsia4354 Physical media on a roll. The longer the "film" the more data. Lets split hairs tho my dude.
@@forestnfren8146 Not really splitting hairs here, just pointing out that it's not analogue vs digital, as your comment seemed to be suggesting. Yeah, it is ironic that we're replacing things with solid state (electrons and whatnot), only to revert to relatively less advanced mediums (pits in plastic, rust on plastic film, etc) for things that matter. I still use optical media for important backups, even though I have SSDs and spinning rust. Methinks it's also ironic that DVHS could hold up to 50GB of data, but was replaced by DVD, which had a much smaller capacity.
It’s a film. The digital data is stored on a magnetic medium on a plastic FILM wound on a reel.
no the anology is shit there is no irony the op is a idiot
We support several large companies who use tape backups in addition to tradItional SAN storage. The trick is using software like Veeam to connect your server the tape system is attached to to the data you’re backing up. It works extremely well assuming you know it’s strengths and weaknesses. Our clients take monthly and weekly data snapshots to tape and nightly/hourly incremental snapshots to SAN. 99% of data restore jobs are from within a day or two so those restore jobs are really quick and painless vs having to drive to the clients off site storage locker to grab whatever tape is needed and go through that mess.
You do not want to rely on employees remembering to swap the tape every day as your backup solution. Since you have that 10GB connection to the local datacenters, colocate a small server with a tape library off-site and stock it with a little over a petabyte's worth of tapes. You keep everything backed up and safe with minimal reliance on people.
Doc Ferringer they don’t need to be changed daily, I would think it would be much longer than that.
Excluding the days of catching up that is, and those can be managed by Linus himself and verified by himself.
the cost of having someone else host your data is high
Couldn't agree more, get a proper tape library from Quantum, like an i6, and do it properly.
or a TS4500
Zack - you know that a petabyte is much larger than 12 terabytes, right? :-)
Only Linux / unix based os used tar. Windows servers used mostly propriety software like Backup Exec, etc.
It's basically just a method to combine files, like what ZIP is doing, but without the compression. There's no need to use it with tapes, it was used a lot, but like Linus says; you just put files on it like you want. I wouldn't recommend TAR as it has no added benefit at all, but WinRAR can read these files anyway.
Hardly, Mac's can use it. Windows using Linux on Windows can use it... oh and anyone who uses 7zip can use them. Tar's are also used extensively if you do any kind of Java based development since tarballs are the underlying structure of a war file .
Surely the benefit of tar is compression is optional and it turns the entire filesystem into a single contiguous file, resulting in minimal spindle spindown and maximising transfer speeds.
Console you can do it with zip as well
@@lmaoroflcopter : I suspect that at least historical versions allowed additions, and maybe replacements, as simple appends.
Plastic and foil frisbees? My new favorite phrase now 😂
*goes in a music store*: "do you carry music on plastic and foil frisbees?"
Actually, track tape storage drives came out in 1951 with UNIVAC when drives relied on vacuum tubes. In 1970 HP (7970E) made reel tape drives that could be used for personal computing, if a person could afford it. Floppies were not the first type of storage, even for personal computing.
That’s pretty neat. So delightfully retro, yet at the same time, very modern. I love it!!
2 years from the future. You should've done it 😁
I would have to spend hours rerolling those back after the tapes are finished
There is something so cool about physical storage! I hope it comes back!
It never left
Everything is physical
I think you should make an episode discussing the pros & cons of different back-up & archival methods like opticals vs. tapes vs. hdd; etc...
I still personally go for opticals due to their longevity CDs, DVDs, BDs can last up to 60 years if kept properly.
Opticals R not longer lasting than drives, generally speaking. The dyes degrade & so on. Drives U must research & some types basically last 4ever, though nothing is perfect! Any drive that spins faster than 5400RPM is basically unreliable trash & U can never depend on them, because they get 2 hot, etc. A quick check on the PC I'm using right now some of the drives have over 80,000 hours on them & no problems, including 'SMART' check =)
Legend has it that about a year later now, he's still backing up those same 4TB to the tape! 🤣😂
*4TB
Whut
He would have finished the petabyte project after 156 days. If he had copied nonstop
Can you boot from it?
Basicly you can boot from nearly any storage medium.
In this case it wouldn't be fun at all.
Booting times would be like 20 Minutes or longer.
Would you need a sticker on the computer saying "Be kind. Remember to rewind."?
In the old IBM AS400 days, we used to have to boot from these things. Not fun.
No, you can't boot from this device, unless you're ready to do some serious scripting and modifications. Those og PC's which used tubes and tapes were obviously designed to boot this way, while modern ones off of solid mediums. It's hard to just switch back and forth.
Yeah you just gotta wait for it to spool.
1:57 Recordable blu-ray disks now can actually store up to 100 GB (25 US dollar per disk). However, 50 GB disks are only 2.65 each. That is 53 US dollar per TB. So for 25,000 $ you could backup 470 TB on high quality disks that last for approx 50 to 100 years. There also exists M-Disc, which lasts up to a 1000 years, however it's 2 times as expensive.
The advantage of optical media is ofcourse the way quicker writing time, and the fast 'n easy way to access individual files. Note: the mentioned pricing is including VAT, so it would be even cheaper for the LMG.
And have like thousands of disks?
9:59 "Syrian Google assistant"? Ohhhhh
Huh… I believe you could actually, massively improve read/write speed performance for random memory access, by either:
A) Make the magnetic ribbon *much* wider, to turn it into basically a magnetic scroll, and put many tracks along the width of the scroll that the read/write head can slide over to.
B) Pack a cartridge with a large number of small tapes reels, which can be accessed with either their own read/write head, or a single read/write head that uses an XY table or something, to move to the individual reels in 2 dimensions.
8:48 "but" he really sound like a cartoon , i can't remember with which.
Chipmunk land
well, the TAR command started as the command to control tape drives. Just later it became default to store files in a "tar ball", which is essentially a tape in the form of a file archive.
A "tar ball"/"tar file" is basically an IMAGE of a TAPE! Like an ISO is an image of a CDROM/DVDROM!
The structural difference of a TAR and an ISO is that a TAR is made so you can extract and archive individual files in it, independently of a file system (as the TAPE). An ISO stores actual partitions and filesystems in it, so it's hard to extract files without mounting the ISO.
In a TAR/TAPE, you don't need a filesystem... just store files and extract!
So, in the old days (and you can still do it today in Linux with LTO), when you add a file to a tape, you would use TAR to do that... If you need to retrieve a file, you just run "tar --extract /dev/st0 ", and it will retrieve JUST the file for you, since the tape ACTUALLY IS the "tar ball" itself. You don't have to retrieve the whole image of the tape to extract something from it.
The tape drive you showed actually is just using LTFS, which is an open source standard, initially developed by IBM, to "format" a tape using 2 partitions, one to store the INDEX of files at the begining of the TAPE, and the second for the actual data.
You can use the same LTFS with ANY LTO in Linux today (that's actually how we backup data at the studio I work for).
We actually got an $1500 LTO7 drive off ebay and put it in one of our servers (5,25", like a cdrom! pretty neat).
We just needed an SAS board with proper scsi rom to operate it (those LSI Megraids don't have proper SCSI subset of commands).
It actually shows up in linux as a Tape device "automagically". Install LTFS, format and mount the TAPE and voila, a drive to write stuff!
I still use mt-st commands (yep, the same from the 70's) to rewind, eject and load a tape though... And if I want to use TAR to store files, I still can.. works fine! LOL
But LTFS saves a lot of trouble and it's just easy to use!
Be carefull though... LTFS has a LIMITED size for its first partition (where it stores it's the file index or its "FAT"), and the only way to free up space is to re-format. (the same goes to the deleted data actually). LTFS doens't handle fragmentation, so you actually CAN'T keep writing/deleting/writing again... you'll notice that when you delete something (unless is the LAST file you wrote to the tape), it DOESN'T free up space!
my 2 cents!!
enjoy your new LTO! :)
I love your RUclips Channel you got me in to building computers
Is it just me that loves when Linus says Throttle
So now you have to store the tapes off sight in a temperature and humidity controlled facility?
Doesn't have to be
MAGNETS
So a bank's safety deposit box?
Seriously many SMBs do this, it's relatively cheap, super secure, and you don't need a ton of space anyway
Typically for a similar operation to what Linus is doing, two copies of the tape will be made. In our case, all of our even numbered tapes are the main ones and the odd number tapes are the backup which are then stored off-site. The tapes probably don't have to be stored in a temp/ humidity controlled area unless they are going to be kept there for decades. Usually, after 10-15 years, the data (if still needed) will be updated to the latest generation tapes to ensure data safety. But this is an ideal situation.
*site
I really love when tech goes full circle
Really nice to see how it works behind the scenes as I work with this particular stuff at work, but from enterprise OS point of view :D... Thanks Linus
When a tape drive is worth more than ur pc+smartphone+console together, feelsbadman
Worth more than the entire contents of my flat rofl.
i mean this is for like business things where businesses have a lot of money and a lot to lose.
It's different when it is in the Enterprise, that is considered cheap when a new server has a hefty price tag of $25,000 for a HP proliant server., $5000 is nothing. Especially when the data on the server is worth more than the server itself. This is the Enterprise market not the consumer market
When a tape drive is worth more than all of your specific personal belongings
Sorry if I missed it, but how much did the actual tapes cost in the end? What's your $/GB ratio?
I agree No Cost of Tapes mentioned. What's the Tape head life as well.
around £80 a 12tb tape! Pretty cheap considering their 30 year shelf life!
cheaper if you buy in bulk (like 100 to 200 a pop)
Did Linus buy all the supply? Its sold out
They put up a picture of it at 4:21.
Watching Linus listening to the tape drive, gave me flashbacks to my BBS days when my files were archived / rosemail / fidonet on my wildcat board in Ontario. We used a SCSI Seagate tape drive (don't remember the tape size) but the server was a blistering 10 Mhz 286, with a 2 partition 40 meg HD, with dos 3 you could only partition to 30 meg I think, so that's why we had the tape drive.
Then you have the Quantum Scalar i6 Tape backup, which stores up to 24 PB and is more cost effective compared to this inferior MagStor drive.
So how exactly is this particular desktop solution inferior?
And it's only cost effective if you have the space and are willing to incur the operations cost of that QSi6.
At a starting price of $7500, sans drive(www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=quantum+scalar+i6)(it'll handle up to 3 btw)
a space requirement of 6U rack(10.4"x17.4"x36.4 per spec sheet(www.quantum.com/en/products/tape-storage/scalar-i6/)) and a weight of 92 lbs, unloaded.
And then you have slot licensing.
Which comes in 25 slot increments.
the unit on ebay comes with 50 slots, which is half the capacity so you'd have to buy two more licenses to get the full capacity.
Didn't find any specifics on whether those licenses are yearly or in perpetuity.
the 24 PB model you mention is 1 contol unit with 7 Expansion units. the expansion units start at 7000 as well, but come with no slot license.
that's also filling a 48U(7 ft tall) rack.
Unless you're dealing with a large data center, and you don't need any kind of portability, then the QSi6 can be a better solution.
For a desktop solution, this one's not bad, price wise(if you bother just to look up prices on amazon or newegg), compared to other solutions.
Every other one i found doesn't include a 3.5" hot swap tray, this one does, or any thunderbolt connections, they are just a desktop drive.
As long as you store the tapes off-site, somewhere fireproof ideally. The old World Trade Center 1's Tape backups were stored in the other tower and that proved to be, well, unwise.
No sorry that is false information --- they were all backed up to tape storage in multiple states
2:02 Even then, he always dropped something
I've been looking for this comment for forever amidst all the porn archival comments.
To answer the question you ask right before the logo, it is because you need things to be stored offsite from your equipment, for "security" (e.g. NOT onsite for a break in to steal private data for whatever purpose) and safety of the media (E.g. NOT burning up when the building goes up in flames).
Tape backup is a great solution though. I do however think that 150TB of storage would be hard for a home user to hit, so tape backup is only for people who are really serious about their data usage.
Imo you should be using a tape drive in a server with something like data protector which will let you schedule backups and do disaster recovery and store once and stuff
huhu, someone works for HPE :)
I think Linux is very suitable for this application.
The best would be automated backups or a Linux backend serving Windows, OS X and Linux over the network
@@resneptacle True. As long as we need Windows for content creation, Linux will be the backend in most media production.
@Vinny0 Yeah, MacOS would be far superior in desktop use if it wasn't so unpopular to create hackintoshes and grayish in terms of legal.
@Vinny0 Not really, both have them same base, Unix, but one is BSD and one is Linux. Also, for that purpose, you'd most likely use a server that handles file transfer with a remote interface
Operating System isn't really relevant here when you need the specific application and drivers to make it happen, heh
Haha, hindsight go brrr
Back in my CIO days (2-3 yr ago), I implemented an LTO enclosure with 8 drives for LTO to backup all stored data on the 150TB NAS, I used "Symantec backup exec" to make a full backup daily, 1 differential every hour, so, when someone made a mistake on a file, I just rollback the file and done, we made special weekly backups that were stored off-site in case of a dissasster or a complete loss, so, the tape backup is not as dead as we thought
Loving the floppy disk usage! Good way to keep old tech in use in some way.
"and tape might just be the way forward for us"
Me from the future 1/29/2022: 🤣
I got one more:
Narrator: It wasn't.
What? did they come up with smth better
I remember in like 2007 a 1gb flash drive was like 30 something dollars. I dug it out of a box not too long ago, and it barely holds files anymore 😂
That scares me to think about
Today, you can get a 32 GB SD card for £3.
Just a minor correction: 1.44MB is *after* the formatting overhead. The full capacity of an HD 3.5" floppy unformatted is actually 2MB.
Unless you are japanese where it would be 2.88