Tapes aren't really archival, either, unless you have several copies. I've done batch recapture off of DV after a few years, and swore when I found serious dropouts. That's relatively low density data compared with LTO (though admittedly with less redundancy and error correction). After that, I dug around and found a copy of the captured files on some old hard drives, which unlike the tape, were intact.

So basically, from what I've seen, nothing is truly archival unless you have multiple copies, and if you have multiple copies, just about everything is archival, so the difference between tape and hard drives is that tape drives require a large up-front investment in a drive in exchange for cheaper per-TB costs for the media and higher physical density (because you don't have redundant electronics going along for the ride). If the per-TB costs aren't less and the density isn't higher, then tape offers no real advantage over spinning disks, IMO, unless your data storage needs are so massive that you have automatic libraries, and even then, only if you can't find a company willing to build a hard-disk-based librarian robot.

At various times, it has been professional, and might be again sporadically, but mostly it's serious hobby.

For home users, it is not a useful identifier because it usually changes regularly. For government users and business users, it is a fairly robust identifier, because most of those folks have static IPs (or at least fixed IPs assigned by a DHCP server).

Of course, there's not a 1:1 mapping between user and IP. So it would be more accurate to describe it as familially identifying information.

I'd rather not have an ultra-competent authoritarian as President, regardless of party. That's the absolute last thing this country needs.

Yes, when you purposely try to take up as much space as humanly possible, it ends up being really big. The least you could do would be leave the raw images on your home media server and keep versions of them compressed to a halfway sane size on the laptop.

Why would I want to do that? I use Lightroom on my laptop for managing my photos. Doing it the way you suggest would A. be an unholy hell, and B. make it impractical to import photos in the field.

By pushing against them. Pushing against a wire usually won't break it. The wire will move a half an inch one way or the other, and then the root goes right past it.

I have a feeling that if the GP did that, both companies would say that it's the phone company's responsibility....

The ultimate horror for me, as a voter, is realizing that I may have to choose between Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton—between someone who nearly bankrupted one of the most profitable companies in the Bay Area and someone who seems to be hopelessly authoritarian in her positions on most issues—in effect, a choice between an incompetent Republican and an ultra-competent one.

Sorry, but you are not going to be lunking around HDs for backups after manually bar-coding, labeling, and cataloging them all for a decent sized business.

Most businesses don't have large storage needs. More and more businesses have users back up their desktop machines to a second drive (e.g. with Time Machine), store critical data on servers, and have IT people back up those servers. And just as many businesses outsource their email to Google, it isn't a big leap from there to outsourcing their server backups to any of the dozens of online backup vendors that are out there.

In the business side, some executives likes to believe that copies of data in different Datacenters are all you need for DR. It's cheap! This works great until you have a replicated corruption that you can't recover from and lose years worth of data.

A live mirror is not a backup. With that said, you can perform periodically rotating replication to multiple backup servers, and use that as a backup solution. That's no different than reusing tapes.

Most real-world data doesn't compress these days. LTO-6 is $40 for 2.5 TB.

The GP wanted to be able to buy a tape drive capable of holding 2.5 TB per tape for $200 (currently ~$2,500–3000), and $5 per terabyte (currently $16) for the tapes.

So no, the numbers don't match what the GP would like to see.

Consumers have mostly moved to external hard drives or cloud storage. I know everyone on Slashdot hates the cloud, but as a backup medium it isn't bad.

Oh yes, it is. It's fine for grandparents who just have a handful of files. For people who either take lots of photos or buy movies and music, it's terrible. Ever back up a 3 TB hard drive at 300 kbps? One backup takes 2.5 years. Even at ~9 Mbps (the U.S. average), it takes more than a month. Internet speeds are just not sufficient for backup purposes. They're two orders of magnitude short of being usable. We really need a nationwide fiber network with gigabit speeds or faster.

If you think 250TB of backup is a lot, then you don't need tape.

Need? Strictly speaking, no. But I'd be a lot happier being able to mail tapes for backup, rather than having to use fireproof hard drives locally. To fully back up my digital life once, I need somewhere on the order of 10 terabytes. I'd like to have several copies, so 50 TB would be convenient. That's 13 hard drives at 4 TB apiece. That takes up a fair amount of shelf space, and is very expensive to ship offsite. By contrast, if tape had kept up, I'd be able to store that data on five tapes, and I have plenty of room for five tapes and a single drive. And I could mail five tapes in a padded envelope.

And hard drives really don't work well for backups. You either keep them constantly spinning (in which case they are likely to be destroyed by the same power event that destroys the main drive) or you have to physically plug them in whenever you want to make a backup. This does not encourage folks to make backups regularly. Compare this with a tape drive attached to a computer, in which the media is effectively offline as soon as you switch tapes (and to some degree, even before). It's just an entirely different world.

On the other hand. I called a shop a while ago to see what they'd give for our 5x LTO4 tapedrives since we upgraded to LTO6 and they only offered us 30 euros per drive. So if you don't need the latest drive out there, you can save a lot of money by buying second-hand.

That might be what they would give you, but that's not what they'll sell it for. Assume that they'll resell that used drive for at least the equivalent of $500 U.S.

Also, we use raw storage in the context of _individual_ incompressible backup sets, not backup data at scale, because very few places backup a high ratio of incompressible data overall.

I'm not convinced that's true. At home, my NAS uses compression, so the raw capacity of the tapes is likely the relevant one, unless the tape somehow manages to recompress lz4-compressed blocks and gain a benefit (not entirely impossible, as lz4 is optimised for speed, but pretty unlikely). At work, the NetApp filer that the tape backups run from also uses compresses and deduplicates online, so not much redundancy there either.

My impression is that a growing percentage of data these days cannot be compressed further:

• Media (pictures, movies, etc.) makes up a growing percentage of data, and is already so compressed that it won't compress further.
• Source code stored in a git archive uses LZW, IIRC, so unless you're compressing a checked-out copy, compression won't buy you much, if anything.
• More and more document files are compressed—Pages files are ZIP archives, EPUB books are ZIP archives, and so on.

I shoot RAW, so 80 GB sounds hopelessly tiny to me. The portion of my photo library that I carry around on my laptop, by itself, would take more than 6 of those tapes to back up once. The entire library would probably be around 10–12, but I don't feel like digging out the external drive just to get a more accurate estimate. :-)

And the DAT-160 tape prices, unlike the drive prices, haven't come down. At $312.50 per terabyte, the tapes cost 10x what a hard drive costs and 5x what laptop drives cost. So you could back up your data 5 times on hard drives for the same cost as backing it up once on tape. And the laptop hard drive would hold as much data as 25 of those tapes, so it will take up an order of magnitude less space to use hard drives as well.

I used to use tape for backup. The reason I stopped was that it stopped being cost effective. There was a time when you could buy one-generation-before-current tape drives, back your entire hard drive up more than once on a tape, and if you bought more than a dozen tapes, you spent less money overall than buying hard drives for those backups.

For about the last decade, tape has lagged so far behind hard drives that this hasn't been the case. You couldn't back up a high-capacity hard drive on last-generation tape. In fact, the current-generation LTO-6 only holds 2.5 TB uncompressed, so in the worst case, you can back up any hard drive built before 2010 (when the first 3 TB hard drives came out). And that tape technology didn't come out until 2012.

And you'll spend almost $3k on the drive, plus $45 per tape, or $18 per terabyte. Hard drives are currently running at $30 per TB. So ignoring differences in risk between a hard drive on a shelf and a tape, the break-even point is at a whopping 250 TB—almost an order of magnitude more than is reasonable for most businesses, much less consumers. Unless you're doing data warehousing, this break-even point is simply too high to be practical. Yet this is the smallest tape drive that is practical for any serious use, because one-generation-old drives (LTO-5) take 2–3 tapes just to back up an average desktop hard drive once, and the break-even point at $33 for 1.5 TB is still over 200 TB. That's just nuts. If you're willing to use ten tapes per drive, you could use LTO-3, but at $30 per terabyte plus the cost of the drive, you never break even at all.

To make a long story short, tape died the moment they stopped building tape drives targeted at normal consumers. As with all specialized products that are too expensive for normal people to afford, over time, cheaper, more consumer-friendly technologies begin to take advantage of their dramatically higher sales volume to drive R&D that allows them to eventually become "good enough" to be used in place of those niche "professional" products for their least demanding customers, thus causing the market to get smaller and smaller. As demand drops, prices then increase, causing even more potential customers to start looking for alternatives, until eventually the death spiral reaches its ultimate and inevitable end: a market that has dried up completely. This same scenario has played out in industry after industry over the years, and anybody who didn't see the writing on the wall more than a decade back must not have been paying attention.

Want me to stop saying tape is dead? Prove me wrong. Ship a consumer-grade LTO-6 drive for $300. Make tape a feasible backup medium for consumers and small businesses. Short of such a drastic step, tape is pretty much doomed to fade into obsolescence. At this point, I'm firmly convinced that the only real question anyone should be asking is how best to handle backups and archiving in a post-tape world; without a giant cash infusion and a radical change in the leadership of companies that build these products, it's not a matter of whether, but rather a matter of when.