this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Magnetic tape. It's one of the better long-term offline backup solutions. It is compact, inexpensive, has no moving parts (bearings, motors, reader heads), no scratchable surfaces, and can last for decades in a moderately climate-controlled room.
Just keep it away from magnets... or iron vaults. According to an anecdote (that I can't find right now), a large bank vault was repurposed as an offsite backup storage, except it kept wiping the magnetic tapes because the thick iron walls reacted to changes in the geomagnetic field.
I'd love to get into tape backups for my stuff. But the price for the drives is absolutely unjustifiable for hobbyists unfortunately.
Correlary: always test your backups and don't just assume that they will work when you need them.
We used to do tape backups up until about 6 years ago, but our higher headquarters decided they wanted to go all in on Rubrik instead. I will say that it is a lot easier to maintain and conduct restores from, and we have all of our various sites' Rubriks backing up to each other for redundancy. But you're definitely right that tape is far cheaper per GiB of storage than anything else.