[OpenIndiana-discuss] Tape backup

[Reginald Beardsley]

Tape as an archival medium has significant issues.  Reading poorly stored tapes is a "one try" proposition w/ no assurance of success.  The first high volume commercial application for digital tape was seismic data acquisition for the oil industry.  The oil companies had very detailed  cleaning and retensioning schedules w/ a large staff to perform them on the tape archives. Absent that level of care, reading old tapes is very difficult and requires great skill.  Old tape is NOT fun to work with.

High capacity tape drives and tapes are not cheap either.  Blank LTO tape is almost as expensive as SATA disk. A ZFS based remote replicating server using triple parity RAIDZ is probably cheaper than tape.  For extremely large volumes and long archival periods, optical tape is probably the best choice.  But then you're probably working for the government.

I would strongly urge comparing the cost of a ZFS backup server w/ daily snapshots to the cost of conventional tape backup. I think you'll be quite surprised at the implications.


Have Fun!
Reg