Tape Drive Adventures 1.0 : Building an LTO-4 Tape Server with an AMD Phenom 9600.
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- Опубликовано: 26 фев 2021
- Exploring the use of an LTO 4 tape drive. I build a dedicated system to run it using an old AMD Phenom X4 9600 and test it out.
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This is one of the most informative videos about tape drives on all of RUclips. I bought an LTO-7 tape library for next to nothing on eBay (I think the seller didn't realise what it was), so while I wait for it to arrive I've been trying to learn as much as I can.
Damn eh, I guess there is not a lot out there. I got a few other vids on this that might also help as I filmed them after I had a better idea of what I was doing.
How much was it?
@@DATT 4 H-O-U-R-S, I feel your pain, bro :-(((
@@steveyoung3130 Takes even longer now that I use certain validation features. I set it up before bed, so it's all good.
@@DATT even after replacing this tape drive?
Great educational video thank you! LTO 4 is a geat and affordable way for simple home made file backups. My only concern is the SAS HBA card, they tend to get very hot due to the tiny passive heatsinks on them. They meant for server environment with plenty of airflow. I have a adaptec ASR-5805 SAS RAID card which gets over 70°C in a normal PC case with average airflow. So I reapplied the thermal paste and put a 40 mm Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX fan onto the heatsink.
Seems like a good idea. My adaptec card did tend to get hot, but it served me reliably for years in my main PC.
Mind you, that was using a HAF case that had a large, all be it, slow fan that was always glowing fresh air over the cards.
IN the computer, that card did fail at one point, and get replaces in a follow up video. Mind you, it wasn't being used when it failed, so I'm not sure it was a heat issues.
Just found you channel because i've just bought a LTO-3 drive + 5 brand new tapes for a ridiculous price on EBAY and i've always wanted to fuss with it. No intention on doing real backup with it, but if I like it i might splurge and try to get an LTO-5 or 6.
Your vid was awesome to get a bit of an idea of how things work! Useful, entertaining video, AND team red? Subbed!
Hah Thanks!
Yeah tape is tricky, it's a really good idea for archiving, but the affordability is debatable.
I invested in LTO-5 and got myself a full box of new tapes for a reasonable price on eBay. LTFS works perfectly.
You are right about the read everything then write it all at once.
I have a LTO-2 drive for smaller projects where I scripted a program to tell me when I hit close to the tapes minimum.
My LTO-5 works with an overhead so I write a minimum of 1.3TB to a tape as not to overfill a tape.
I almost got an LTO5, or at least that's what I was originally looking at. LTFS would of been nice.
I loved my phenom 9600, it was the only stable system I had for almost an entire year, for some reason no other system felt like working correctly. I will always look back fondly on that little phenom!
I don't recall it being unstable. But then, it was under clocked and had bios settings that caused it to under perform, so of course it would be stable under those conditions. It was suppose to be a lot faster then it was, but it was intentionally nerfed for stability. Sound like you didn't have much luck with PC's back then. I do recall it being a more unstable era unless you really knew how to rub them right, especially with the AHCI issues at the time.
Well, not sure what you were running before, but going from an FX-60 to this was disappointing because the FX was faster per core, so you took a notable hit in some of the games at the time, as multit hreaded gaming was relativity new.
@@DATT It actually was a good solid year of bad luck, Indeed. I actually kind of side graded from q6600 system, so ya there definitely was a bit of a performance drop, but the fact that the phenom system would actually consistently work definitely made an impression
@@Grizaptimus Damm, I never used Intel back then do I have no idea how stable they were. That is quite the performance loss tho. I wonder if you had just under clocked it or something.
@@DATT I think it was just me, my buddy was rocking a q6600 system as well at the time and his was rock solid. The phenom was definitely worse in performance, overclocking etc. But I was just happy for a system that worked
@@Grizaptimus I wonder if it was a power issue. You recall the PSU you had at the time.
I had this one buddy, he was curse, system glitched ALL THE TIME. I build this system for him. He kept bringing it back, I kept troubleshooting, I subbed out every part at one point to the end that it wasn't even the same system, still kept glitching, but at his place, it would work fine at mine.
Turning out, the old house he was living in, had really crappy power. If I recall, the ultimate solution was to get a heavy duty extension cord, and run it to the kitchen, plug it into the stove, haha. It's a weird hack, but the stove has it's own circuit right, so that one little plug on it is like a dedicated line.
"A herd of bees if bees made cat noises!" - great video thanks!
Oh yeah, bud ! You're welcome !
Nice video, cool hat!
Hah, yeah, I like it.
Hey man, awesome video - keep it up! Subscribed.
/ A fellow tape adventurer
Hah, it was only an adventure cause I wasn't sure what I was doing and figuring it out as I go along.
I've done much the same thing. I got an external SCSI LTO4 drive and a load of LTO3 tapes from work (I work in IT). I also managed to grab a couple of SAS LTO5 drives and tapes from work, I cant use those yet as they are library drives and need a bit of setup. So far the LTO 3 tapes are more than enough for backing up my BD-R archive.
My SCSI controller had settings to prevent it scanning every SCSI ID on boot, I just configured it to only scan the ID ised by the external drive. Maybe the SAS controller has similar options?
Also LTO4 is 1.6TB when compressed, 800GB uncompressed. And depending on what your data is, your compression level varies.
It does go back and forth, it may rewind slightly if the buffer emptied and it needed to adjust speed, also it writes in a "serpentine" fashion where it records to tracks that run the full length of the tape. The entire tape ends up on the internal spool, then the head moves down to the next track and records to tape with the tape running in the opposite direction. Filling the tape ends up with it being spooled in and out of the cartridge multiple times, you can hear the moment when the tape reverses direction as a sort of stutter.
You issue with "rewriting existing data" to the tape, is the fault of the software. The software decides how to use the tape, it seems to be written to backup a fileserver/HDD like you are doing, not for archiving. In fact you are not writing the data again, well it shouldnt be doing that, what is happening is the software is reading it all back to find the end of the data.
Other than LTFS there are 2 ways tapes usually get used. Both of them involve writing a tar file to the tape, or something similar. TAR stands for Tape ARchive, and it is even today a widely used method of archiving multiple files together in one file, usually with compression. Zip is another such file format, along with RAR etc. TAR has one slight issue, its designed for tape. It works fine on a HDD but to get to the data you want, at the end of the TAR for example, the archive program must read through ALL the existing data from the start of the archive till it finds the file you want. TAR is not random access, if you are using backup software that is simply adding new files to one HUGE tar file that spans the entire tape then that backup software will need to read through the entire tape to find the end of the existing data.
LTFS obviously is loved because it resolves that.
Or you do it the other way. The tape can hold multiple TAR files. Each file is accessible separately, thus you can have the software wind on to file 10 and extract data from that. Thats how I use my tapes, although I use more manual methods (I run tar manually). When I have new data to archive I just consult my notes on that tape to find the file number of the last file on tape and ask the tape drive to wind to the next file after that, the next file being the blank area that I'm going to write the next tar to.
I dont now if any backup software exists that can let you use that method, I'm sure there is.
Basically this is my setup. I archive data of HDD to BD-R. Is is archive data, it wont ever change and I want it off the unreliable HDD's as I want that space for other stuff. I burn a manually curated selection of data to a BD-R, I then index all the files so I can do a simple text search. The next step is to backup the entire BD-R to tape. I put the tape into the drive and looking at my tape spreadsheet I can see what is the number of the last file I wrote to tape. I run a command to have the drive wind to the end of that last file, specifically the first block of the very next file. Then I use tar to archive the contents of the BD-R to this new file. I add the details to the spreadsheet. Should a BD-R get damaged/lost etc I can recover all of its files, or just the few I need by winding the tape to the relevant file.
Better backup software will do this, it will manage the tape for you, it will know where the files are and handle winding and rewinding the tape each time.
Wow, you're really into it. Yeah, I think my software is limiting some of what I can do, but so far it's the best I found that you don't need to learn programming and IT to use.
Compression is no good for me cause I'm backing up video. Video is already compressed, so I don't bother. If I can get 800gb a tape, I'm happy.
This was awesome, great video!
Hey Thanks, check out the 2 follow up videos if you havent' already.
@@DATT Definitely will!
A good video, thanks. Maybe you could do some closeups with talking and no noise other than the PC itself to see what kind of noise the LTO drive makes. Some of them are extremely noisy/loud.
Oh this one was pretty grindy. You looking for some Tape Drive ASMR or something ?
I'm working on my own journey with surplus tape libraries and drives. One thing you may have figured out (or not) is that you can setup a "Virtual Tape Drive" using HDD which you mock up your tape backup - then do a duplication from the VTD to the actual LTO tape drive.
Kind of sounds like what I do.
In a later video, I add a 2.5" hotswap bay to the machine. I load projects I want to back up onto a 2.5" hdd, then when it's full, I pop it in this machine and run the backup.
Great video. My only question is how did you find the right controller/sas card that worked with your drive? I look around and can't find them that easily.
I would assume any SAS card should work. In my case, I had an old SAS card left over from a raid setup I had years ago, it worked for a while. When I replaced this drive, the one I got came with a card. I can't say I have a straight answer to that, other than I'd jsut be surfing the ebay for a part that fits my needs. I wouldn't worry about the hardware compatibility itself as much as the cabling. There are all sorts of different kinds of SAS cables, finding the right one that will link your card to your drive can be the tricky part.
Mmmmm tasty travan tapes aka Ximat aka Qic80. 125mb. I miss those days
Oh boy. By time I got my hands on a Qic80 it was too small to be useful.
did you think that you could also break the unit that reads the tapes .. because it has many mechanical parts inside and heads that get dirty ...
This unit did fail, seems it was a lemon, I have more videos about it.
And yeah, they do have some fragility to them, and are know to wear with use cause of all the moving parts. I have a cleaning tape for mine, so that is a common maintenance thing.
This LTO needs a fan
It has one. It crapped out anyway, check out the next few vids.
Hi, very cool video. I like the sound of these backup drives.
I didn't understand why you are do twice full backups.
My experience is to make a full backup of your 4 TB HDD which can take a lof of time and tapes (let say 6, 1-6). Than the backup program unset the archiv bit in the file system for those files were backuped.
Next backup task, you can choose Incremental or Differential backup.
Incremental means backup all files with archiv bit set to tape (now you need tape # 7). Check, if program allows you to append to tape. Than you can use the same tape til is full.
Differential means backup all files who was not in the full backup set. Check here too if program allows you to append to tape.
Another topic
If the tape drive doesn't get as fast as much data, the drive doesn't slow down immediately and write fill data, that's why you have less usage on some tapes.
I recommended to use always hardware compression to set on.
I since got it all figured out, but it was an anomaly. I can't really explain better what I was up against without spoilers.
It's it's not backed up in 3 places then it's not backed up at all.
@@dlarge6502 Yeah, pretty much.
I had a LTO4 system since 2017, which I got from eBay for around 200 dollars, it is unfortunately SCSI and not SAS. I rarely have been using it until now where I have been recording lots of videos on my computer. These recordings are precious and I don't want to lose them, at the same time I cannot have them sitting on my computer disks because they take up too much disk space. I haven't cleaned the tape drive, but the drive still works! Now my only fear is what will happen 30 years later with the data on these tapes. I am worried about them being unreadable. Maybe in 20 years from now I will probably buy myself an LTO 8 drive and transfer the data onto newer tapes. Oh by the way, the dell optiplex 980 which runs the tape drive is more powerful than your system. :p
Well 30 years is pretty good. You can't trust a hard drive past a year or 2. Yeah, I think by then you'd of migrated over to something different. I think in 10 years we'll score used LTO8's on ebay for cheap. Get our while library down to a few tapes. Hah.
Well, this system was not intended to be powerful, and I certainly don't have the system the drive might have come with.
You may have noticed by now, I've since upgraded it in another video.
@@DATT I am worried that in 30 years from now, my tapes will become unreadable, but the hard drives might still work. We don't know how long these mediums will last. Some hard drive from the 80s still work. Some audio cassettes from the 70s are still audible. I think in 10 years I will transfer them into newer tapes and keep the older tapes.
@@judenihal A hard drive might work, but that doesn't mean the data will be readable. Harddrives are susceptible to "bit rot" if you want to look that up. They got maybe 2 years before the magnetism on the platters starts to fade away. I've had it happen to me. If def found mysterious corrupt data on old hard drives that are otherwise 100% functional.
Hard drives from a long time ago, wrote a stonger magnetic signal on a larger space, today, it's a weaker signal on a microscopic space.
Hard drives are designed to be "online" and out computers and especially NAS boxes have maintenance algorithms, that will scan the drive and rewrite data that has become weak.
Not I'm not 100% sure on tapes, but they are deliberately designed for archival, so they write the data in such a way that it won't fade as much.
I can say with certainty, a modern hard drive won't retain all it's data for that long.
But of course, the idea is that, in maybe 10 years time, you rewrite the data to a fresh tape, on a newer drive right. So having it last is a moot point.
The other option is like an M-Disc blue ray burner. Those are suppose to last 100 years.
Problem is, they are very expensive per GB.
I pretty much have both, a Hard Drive copy, and a Tape Backup of that Hard Drive.
I feel like you are the generational result of the Red Green show.
Haha, oh boy. Well, I do have a bit of a "hack it together" vibe in some of my videos.
Do All The Things, with tape!
Some things with Tape at least.
Idk i've got one of these LTO4 Drives myself and i am running it directly in my nas. Linux is really great for using Tape drives somehow, it got recognised instantly (no drivers neccesarry) and there is a little program called tar which can write to these things AAAAND even on LTO4 add to an archive without writing the whole thing again (It just needs to read until the End of the File). You can specify where it is and just put it on there. Even with compression if you like. Ejecting works fine as well with a program called mt (which is like tar preinstalled (at least on my distro)) The only negative thing is you have to fiddle deep in Commandlines which can be scary but hear me out its somewhat managable XD
Yeah, I've been told about TAR many times. I just kind of wanted an easy windows based GUI program, and I got that with Uranium. My workflow is pretty much figured out at this point and running smoothly.
Hey I have a question I can buy an internal Hp lto 6 drive for 90 dollars or an external lto 7 drive for 120 dollars. I have some 4tb important files uncompressed and an additional 8tb less important files. What do you think I should get?
Well, I'd opt for the bigger one. Mind you, I'd go by the price of tapes, which can you get more of for cheaper.
Also, those are some damn good prices for those drives, I'd buy an LTO7 for that right now, but I'd worry why it's so cheap, they can wear out.
LTO4 drives have variable write speeds that try and match the source device throughput to avoid the start-stop cycles that you hear at the beginning. This "rubberbanding" can reduce tape life pretty drastically if you hear it a lot. Enterprise tape backup solutions usually have some sort of spool device that's ultra-fast so you can keep the tape drives buffer filled. Also make sure if you can set the block size with Uranium Backup to crank it up to like 1Mb or something. LTO drives backing up large files will benefit from having the larger block size set.
I spied in the video it's set to 32k. This obviously will work, but you might be able to increase throughput to the tape if you can/do bump it up.
Yeah, that was the program default that I dind't bother with at the time. I'm currently using 64k, but I'm thinking I can bump it up. A large block size wastes space if you file are small, but I was thinking recently, there are very very few files that small. Backing up vids, lots of it is easy in the gb per file.
@@DATT I use a fibrechannel HP LTO4 drive and for some reason anything below 128K blocksize is super slow for me. Not sure if that's a fibrechannel thing or what the deal is.
Hmm no idea. Do you recall what you average data rate is?
I got 5.1gb/m my last burn.
@@DATT Yeah around 5GB per hour which is 80MBps ish. If I had a better spool device the tape drive can handle up to 120MBps I think.
I bought LTO-3 drive at a low price, so I want to use it on my computer.
Can I use it when I only install the SAS controller driver and LTO drive driver?
I just want to archive some files on my computer and I don't need backup.
What do you mean ? Drivers are standard. Windows 10 might have them baked in. I got lucky with my current card and drive.
Do you mean without the software ? No not with LTO3, you'll need a program to access the tape and move data on and off it.
Uranium works well, and it's easy GUI based.
@@DATT Ahh okay thanks for replying!
Folio Photonics is working on a CD Drive that has 1 TB discs.. Each disk around 5$. Can't wait!!
That seems interesting, as it stands right now BR can't compete.
However, I'll believe the price point when I see it.
Tape has a pretty low cost per GB too, when I looked at the Folio site it was maybe double what they were quoting. Catch is, the disk drive might cost like $3000. Tape is way cheaper than HDD in the long run but the cost to get started is insane.
@@DATT ofc it will be expi for early adopters, but it'll just has to get cheaper in the long run
@@antonioveloy9107 I guess we'll see. It's an interesting concept anyway. Assuming the archival life it good.
Sony already have a 5.5 TB optical disc system called ODA and it’s ridiculously expensive.
cool
👍
used tape? help me out, I thought that LTO 3. LTO 4 and on, are able to write only once. Do you have a solution for this?
No, you can rewrite tapes just fine. All the tapes I have are used. There are write once tapes, but they are specialty. I think they call them "WORM" tapes. Common tapes can be re written.
Only thing, is they are said to have a lifespan in that regard. You can only pull them thru a tape machine so many times before they stretch out of spec. However, that's not an issue with normal use, especially archival use. Some drives have utilities that can tell you tape life and how much it's been read and written in it's life. My old drive had that, my new drive, not so much.
@@DATT Well, that is a great news! Thanks
@@makingastardestroyer3066 You Welcome !
I would like to give some points which should help you in future:
1) Your classic drives will be the bottle neck. On Tape you want to stream the data in constant speed, otherwise the drive will speed up, stop, speed up, stop etc. which causes uneccesarry war and tear on the tape and the drive. I personally use a 1TB SSD as temp drive.
2) LTO doesn't need to rewrite the whole last session. This should be a software problem. Do you know TAR from Linux/Unix/FreeBSD? TAR=tape archiver The big plus point is, that you can write your backup on every sytem and you can recover the data on every older and every newer system. While your windows software works today, do you know it it will also run in 5...10 years?
3) In combination with TAR have a look on the MT command. Write one backup with tar to the tape. With MT you can seek the end of the written track. Then call TAR again to add new data to the end. but be careful, if you did only search the next track, you may overwithe your older backup.
4) As the harddisks also LTO doesnt calculate witth 1025 but with 1000. This means you can only store 800.000.000.000 Bytes on one LTO 4 Tape without compression.
5) Under Linux the TAR command can split the backup across multiple tapes by using the -M switch. but be aware, under FreeBSD this switch doesn't exist. And also, if you loose one tape the whole backup is usually gone.
I personally collect 800GB as ziped TAR ball on my SSD and then copy the files on the Tape. Takes about 3 hours.
Classic Drive ? YOu mean a hard drive ? Nah, I thought of that already. Maybe a newer LTO drive, but the spin drive had no trouble keeping up to this LTO4. I confirmed that in troubleshooting.
This is first in a series of 3 vids about this experience. Spoiler alert, the 3rd video is about how I found out this drive was defective. When I got another one it runs perfect.
It's def a software issues, what I'm using doesn't support adding to the tape. One go or no go, But that's ok. My workflow has me save up all the projects to disk, then burn when I have a full tape worth. It's a good way of doing things, cause as you mentioned, unnecessary wear.
Tar and Linux are off the table, they don't suit my needs.
@@DATT Linux would fit your "needs" way better than you think. These drives are way more efficient in Linux than Windows. There's less overhead. Also, tar is WAY WAY better than any commercial software for tape archiving. I'm telling you this as a Windows user who knows where Linux fits as I've been using Linux since the early 90s.
Oh, I'm well aware of that, I just wasn't interested in learning a new OS, just for this one application.
You might have noticed, this is one vid in a series, in the end I got this system running sweet, even with Windows, so I'm happy with it. Lucky for me, I'm very familiar with windows, so I can usually hack on it a bit to make it fit a specific need.
@@DATT I finished watching the video before I left my snarky comment. The windows software did work rather well, I will admit, but I'm still convinced tar is better for errror handling. I apologize too for my ...um... temperament. Bad days, ya know? :D
Well, I didn't really take any offence to it. The comments are somewhat common, as not everyone might have seen a whole series before commenting. Or in some cases, I don't talk about everything I've already thought of or tried in a project before making a vid about it. I tend to edit in such a way to portray what I did, not everything I tried. I didn't touch linux, but I did try like a half a dozen different tape programs before settling on this one. I can't recall if a windows version of Tar was in there.
Do they even make one of those. There were a couple that were text based.
14:36 I got answer to your question about why the tape says 800GB but it stopped burning at less. Reason is that windows uses something called MiB (Mebibytes) which is calculated by sets of 1024 instead of sets of 1000. So 1 MiB equals 1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824 MB. The MiB uses binary system (2^10, 2^20, 2^30...) and the MB uses decimal system (10^3, 10^6, 10^9...).
Yeah, I'm familiar with this concept, It's half applicable to me.
The drive I was using in this video turned out to be defective. I replaced it in a follow up video.
After a while I was getting less and less per tape, as low as 600gb.
After replacement, that problem is gone, I get like 780 ish a tape, which is in line with what you're talking about.
This is actually an issue with Microsoft mixing binary prefixes with decimal prefixes just like some people mix KB and Kb, Bytes and bits.
The Binary prefixes are Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, Tebi and are shortened Ki, Mi, Gi, Ti. The higher you go the larger is the difference between the corresponding decimal prefix.
For example, 1 Petabyte is only 10^15 / 2^50 = 88.8 % of 1 Pebibyte. The correct presentation in Windows would be 0.89 PiB, 909 TiB or 1.00 PB, however it would erroneously be displayed as 0.89 PB or 909 TB.
@@christoffer4862 Yes thats true!
@@christoffer4862 You kind of wish the industry as a whole developed a standard, eh.
It depends on what program you use to add stuff to a tape I used lto 4,5 and ferro to backup
Ah, which part are you referring to ?
now if you had a backup Job that ran over could you insert a new tape and continue the backup?? I am trying to find the software that would keep track of what Data is on what tapes and keep going
I believe there is software that can do that. The stuff used in tape library automation. IT's more complicated.
The software I'm using is super basic. Manual GUI style. So I can just put files onto tape.
@@DATT I looked it up its called yoyotta its mac exclusive but very powerful for $350
Oh boy, that was part of my challenge when finding software.
Simple, windows, and cheap.
So far what I got is working for me.
E-waste is a good source. managed to obtain a grab bag of tapes and LT02/3 tape drives.
You live in a bigger city ? That does sound sweet. I doubt I'd come across anything like that where I'm from that's not behind closed doors. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where the surplus used tapes I got came from.
Hello, I bought the same product at eBay after watching this video, which is very helpful.
May I ask where you got the software? I just can't find it :(
I don't mean the Uranium backup program, but I want to install the dashboard 3.8 program
I forget, I'm pretty sure I found it on the Quantum website.
This drive died shortly after I got it, turned out to be a lemon, it got replaced with an IBM drive that didn't have nice utilities like the Quantum did.
i only made it to "ive got 2 vega 64s in it" before bustin. in all seriousness though, looking to add tape backup ability and i've nearly got a whole PC of spare parts lying around, might have to go this route.
Good bustin or bad bustin ?
The ol 9600 worked well but used a lot of hydro doing it.
I upgraded it in the next vid, and that was a sweet spot.
Now I get it. You put a second folder to an existing Backup Set. That's why it is now 55 GiB.
Yeah I wanted to be able to back up projects as I finished them, 50gb here, 100 there, kind of thing.
@@DATT Okay. I would suggest that you create an empty folder like "Backup Projects". After this you make a full backup of this folder.
Now, if you finished a project you can put the project in that folder and run a differiantial backup job. It's important to select only this folder. The software recognize the change in this folder and back up only the changes. I hope this helps.
I'm currently using an Asus m5a97r2 with an AMD PileDriver CPU
Oh wow, I had that similar rig a while back.
LTO4 and older doesnt support partioning, means that you cannot use LTFS(LinearTape FileSystem). its a nice feature but not neccessary.
It is still possible, to write data at the end of the previous Data. You prob. need a different Software(like Veeam(can be cr4ck3d or a free NFR license obtained) or find a incremental backup option in your Software
Yeah, I spent a fair amount of time sparring with the software and it just didn't want to roll that way.
I think I tried Veeam among others, I think it worked less the way I wanted.
I jsut want to like "here's some files, put them on tape" and most programs were enterprise grade intended to be used on remote servers and were not as transparent as I liked. SO far I'm digging Uranium now that I have my flow figured out and I don't see switching at this point.
@@DATT You can do it very easily too. Just install Veeam backup &replication. Create a Tape-Server on the Same host. and then create a simple backup job(e.g. from a Sambashare to Tape, or just local Disk to Tape). You then can easily do incremental backups.)
@@DATT if you really just want the files on tape... you could use tar on linux... 😂
Ohhhh boy!
it kinda sounds like a vhs recorder, also thinking about LTO 4 or 5 cause of RUclips :D
VS Recorder ?
Yeah, for archival you can't go wrong. Esp considering my first drive died but hey, I didn't loose data like I would if it was a hard drive.
@@DATT VHS recorder :D (they where used for backup in the past too)
just, got a Scsi Lo4 drive and 3 tapes, an adaptech scsi card i still have floating in my stash
Oh yeah, I know VHS, still have one even. Never use it tho.
They used them for backup? Like computer Data backup ?
Ah, Adaptec Scsi's seems to make their way into stashes. Hopefully it works well. I'm kind of over Scsi, but it's pretty straight forward so it should work well.
@@DATT eh i am a retro nerd and the drive was 20€ yeah LGR made a video about VHS data backup :3
VHS data backup, oh my. I never had of such a thing. I guess I'm going to have to check that out.
Incremental should add a backup that has everything since your last backup
Yeah, but with this software it seemed to want to write the whole tape over again, and needed the original files present. I couldn't just add a few more files to the tape.
@@DATT ya don't quote me on this but I don't know if you can do an incremental backup on tape. I would think you would have to read the whole tape and rewrite it after which kind of defeats the purpose of an incremental backup
@stevanastardust8487 If I recall, it might have been possible in LTO5 and later.
This is an old vid now, I've got the workflow process down by now. I have a few other vids about this if you're interested.
Hey, i got a LTO-4 Tape drive like, near 2 years ago. for incredibly cheap. However when I bought a SAS card I made a error and accidentally bought a cheap raid card (A Adaptec 540z I think, i just remember it supporting tape drives according their website), which reportedly don't work very well even though its the only device. Drivers didn't work, and almost any default backup program didn't work either. The only thing i've found thats ever been able to write to it was this old program called ZDatDump which they don't even sell anymore and no one ever cracked. According to some reddit user only stuff that directly writes to the drive works.
Sorry for dumping this on you, I've only just seen like 2 people have a LTO4 tape drive and its very difficult to find info on em. I was just wondering if you knew any programs for (preferably) linux that acted that way.
Sadly my experience with tape drive is limited to what you see in the few vids I made about it. Check out the related playlist for Tape Drive Adventures 3.0 where I end up replacing my SAS card. Might give you some insight.
That said, I'm running Uranium on Windows 10. I have no idea about linux software. The name Tar keeps coming up for that camp as I recall.
@@DATT Ah. thanks. yeah I heard about tar a lot and it never worked with this setup. I might just have to end up replacing the card. thank you though, I'll check out your other stuff!
Cool man. Yeah, Windows is all I really know. Outside of that, I got nothing.
It's like DVD RW but worse, it becomes a ROM after you're done writing whatever, and you have to fully wipe it before actually writing it
Nope
Yeah no, you can totally rewrite a tape, more reliably then a DVD-RW. In fact all my tapes are used. They will wear out eventually, but still more reliable then an RW. And the selling point on them is shelf life. You can get M-disc now, but at one point, DVD disks would slowly rot over time. For archival, tape is the way to go. Good for at least 30 years.
They also have more capacity, that works out to be more affordable per GB then say a Blue Ray.
Bid deal . Storagetek had made tape storage devices
Admittedly, I'm not sure how to respond to this.
It is most likely your software my software does allow me to append the data to the tape.
What software do you use ?
tar on Linux/BSD can write new files to LTO after the end of the previous session. So can Veeam on Windows when doing incremental backups. This is entirely a limitation of the software.
Hey @DATT or anyone else reading this comment. I am from a church in Hawaii and have some old LTO4 tapes and LTO deck with a SCSI card and cable. Unfortunately I cant find software for an old Mac Pro (Early 2009) when we used to have it connected to that. Would anyone be willing to send me a quote to pull data off of 16 LTO4 tapes? I can send an external drive with the tapes. TIA!
I think you'd have to consult a professional data recovery service. That or, instead of looking for someone tho know about LTO drives, find someone who is an expert at MAC's to set you up with a system identical with the one you used to use.
The problem with LTO backup, which is a huge concern really, is you need to use the same software to recover that you used to back up, or at least compatible software. I would pop your tapes into my system, but unless they are compatible with the Uranium program I'm using, I likely won't be able to read them. I also don't have, or know MAC's, so I wouldn't be able to handle the data even if I could get onto the tapes.
@@DATT Thanks! Ya, though im a tech nerd, im very unfamiliar to LTO. Thanks for letting me know. They are Sony Uranium tapes if that helps. Im not sure who did them back in the day or what software they used. I was wrong with thinking they were accessed with via a SCSI drive... it was actually a Mini SAS SFF-8088 card/cable that was used on our HP LTO4 Deck. Do you know off hand of a recovery service that does LTO tapes? if not, I'll Google it myself.
Interesting video, can I forward this to bilibili.com (it's like a Chinese-version RUclips somehow, but the user may focus on the young generation). I'll translate and put on the Chinese subtitles, also will specify the source of the video.
Oh, I guess I don't see why not.
Just this video?
@@DATT Ha, just this video for now, really for-human-reading translation does cost time. I will forward others after this I guess.
Was just thinking about how I have 3 episodes of this project. Ones vid would not tell the whole story.
But yeah, that's fine. I'm cool with that.
@@DATT Don't worry, I’ll make them into a series.
Hah, cool, man !
try LTO 9
Ohh, I'd love to. Maybe when I'm at a Million subs I'll be able to afford it, haha.
Got a sub outa me. You're awesome.
Thanks !
i got a lto 3 drive for free i might mess with it someday
Might be handy. I think this LTo4 is the smallest practical for me. Kind of wish I had a newer one.
@@DATT yeah the lto 3 seems not worth it now days i can get a 500gb hard drive cheaper that the lto3 tapes [400gb/800gb]
@@davideriksen2434 Oh yeah no, hard drives are totally more affordable than tape. The whole reason for tape is long term archival and being able to recover in the even of mechanical failure. Hard drives don't do that. I got into tape cause I wanted those abilities and this was the best bang for buck at the time.
Youre wrong about the SAS HBA, you can flash new firmware on it, or in your case, remove the boot rom. the BIOS doesnt need to boot from it. Youre complaining about problems, that are not even there. Just inform yourself better about what is causing what(e.g. slow DOS-compatible rom inside the controller, e.g. for managing it before the real system boots)
Hmm, I wasn't aware you could do that. I looked for an option to disable the boot ROM in the controller settings but there was none.
I did flash the card at one point, updated it to the latest firmware, I dont' recall seeing other firmware options on the site.
Do you know where I could find a non boot rom firmware for this card ?
@@DATT Is it an LSI Card? then you can use the lsi flash tools
Adaptec 2405. Probably a basic bitch consumer card as far as Sas cards go. If I ever add a SAS card to my main rig, I might look into that. Seems used SAS drives sell for half the price of the sames sized Sata drives, and I'm always buying up storage these days.
@@DATT hmm, doesnt seem to be a lsi based card... it prob. requires some reverse engineering to remove the bootrom, if its not possiblr to disable it. i myself use fibrechannel, its so much nicer.
Is it just be, or do all the FC HBAs have external ports, but of course the drive I might want is internal.