this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
45 points (97.9% liked)

Selfhosted

61578 readers
414 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.

  8. AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

So...I was wondering. Is there any backup tape system that would be advisable to use for backing up some TBs? I guess I need it to be USB, as the server is a micro PC, one of those tiny ones you can hang from behind a monitor. It's an HP ProDesk.

Thanks!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] axum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Just use a spinning rust drive for periodic backup.

Nothing you have is worth the cost of a LTO setup.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 6 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

This is the answer.

I haven't done the math, but even SMB's don't use tape today.

They may do a local replica and then some kind of local-hardware-based cloud backup solution, because cost and capability.

[–] bluGill@fedia.io 7 points 4 hours ago

Large companies still use tape for their large data sets. Tape has some useful advantages that make it worth it in very specific situations.

The first is when you have a lot of data - if you have several hundred of even thousands tapes (likely including duplicates!) then the quantity of data you have backed up is large enough the tapes are the cheapest.

The second - as hinted above - is duplicates. If you don't want the data lost a tape is a good answer to have several copies. While a disk might be cheaper, they are fragile and computers are not designed to swap disks that often. Even USB which is designed for swapping isn't that good: the connector will physically wear out a lot faster than you would expect making the costs much higher to manage this. Plus the labor to plug/unplug a lot of drives will get you.

Third, some tapes come in a write once form. If you have data that (often for legal reasons) you need to store such that it cannot be modified later then tape is often you best answer to ensure the data really wasn't changed. (either by an executive hiding their tracks, or an attacker trying to put ransomware on you).

That said, for most reading this, a few disks in a NAS is better than about 98% of people have and if you have snapshots on the NAS probably good enough for everything (your only risk is fire or theft of the NAS - if you cannot live with this get a second NAS elsewhere, or a cloud backup), similar cost, and has enough other useful features that you want it anyway.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Does make you wonder who does use tape? Id assume big businesses just use cloud, so who is left that uses tape?

[–] EarMaster@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Depending on what cloud tier you are using they might use tape then (e.g. IBM Cloud Object Storage Deep Archive).

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Don't clouds mostly just rely on replication across zones though?

I would have thought tapes were just too slow to be useful in that environment.

I'll read up on the IBM deep archive.

[–] EarMaster@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Many use just HDDs. The load delay is usually because they don't want to spin up every disk just for one chunk of a file, so they collect jobs and schedule spin up and down times.

But there are dedicated services that indeed use tape.

[–] zarathustrad@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

I always assumed that's why the cheaper longer term storage took so long to recover (having to physically retrieve copies, even if it's automated), but I have no real knowledge on it. Interesting.