I'm definitely getting older, but it was not me who brought up DLT. I think the AC was recommending that the submitter find an old DLT drive on eBay or some such place and use that. While that would make the drive itself cost-effective, I wanted to show that there is a reason those old things are available for a low cost.

If you do modern tape, compression is worthless on video and music, which is presumably already compressed - so you will need the full tape capacity. The tape drives themselves cost more than buying 40TB worth of hard drives. Tape is great for many use cases, but backing up your home media center probably isn't one of them.

Yes, I was responding to the DLT suggestion. I should have been more explicit.

I was addressing the comment to use a DLT drive. Those only hold 600GB compressed.

On niggle with your response, though... you won't get any substantial compression with music or video. You will likely need double the number of tapes that you think you will.

With the right setup, you could leave everything in the master directory and just add symbolic links to a backup directory. That way the backup solution won't get in the way of the setup. You could even write a little utility that automatically backs stuff up that you rank highly with whatever program you are viewing with. Back when CDs were expensive, I would only backup my "3-stars and over" playlist in iTunes.

At 300GB per tape for the best, most expensive tapes that would require 69 tapes (and 69 hours) for a full backup. At around $120 per tape, that is over $8000, just in tape. A second RAID with full redundancy would be far cheaper - the 10 4TB hard drives coming in at around $1700. Doing it with 2-drive redundancy would only require 7 drives.

I'm not on the scale of you guys, but I just approach it as if the hard drives come in sets. I never buy a single hard drive unless I'm replacing a failed drive. If I can't afford enough hard drives to expand my capacity along with backup, I just make do with what I have. A good culling can make a remarkable amount of space available. Tools like "Grand Perspective" on Mac and "SpaceMonger" on Windows make this chore a bit less tedious. Once your kids are over a certain age, do you really need those ripped seasons of Dora the Explorer? Are you ever going to watch Minority Report? Are you ever going to catch up on those old episodes of Daily Show?

That said, I don't generally bother backing up movies. If the RAID barfs, oh well. There are exceptions, and all of my music is backed up... who wants to rip all of those CDs again? And music only takes up a few hundred GB.

While I agree, who are we to judge? It's a technical question, not one of lifestyle. For what it's worth, 20TB is only about 400 ripped BluRays. A large, but not inconceivable, video collection. If he's doing home movies, these can eat up serious drive space. The nicer consumer models capture at around 24Mbps... over 10GB per hour. Anyone with a first baby who likes to take videos probably has many hours of video.

While I've never had the throttling issue that you have, I do want to point out that they accept seed drives if your initial backup is taking a long time.

Well, it's local storage to a computer somewhere. If that computer can run Backblaze, then super.

There's a difference, but I'm not sure it is meaningful in the context of the article. It's like taxes... if you only count the taxes that I pay directly, then my tax burden is very low. But I think in a discussion of how much tax we pay, it is fair to include automatically withheld tax payments. This article seems analogous to me.

On the cellular phone network.

Does it work?

If so, then they missed one.

But it still makes phone calls, unlike an iPod.

Are we arguing about imaginary upgrades for imaginary house helper robots? :)

Yes, I think people make upgrades to their house with the full knowledge that these will go obsolete. My whole house was wired to the hilt... with old-fashioned multi-line phone cable. Pretty much useless now. So I pull cable. As you say, eventually my CAT5e and CAT6 will go obsolete - and I'll upgrade again.

People who need a traveling robot will pay more for that capability, just as people who need to use power tools away from an outlet pay more today. People who don't want to buy a new "robot friendly" drill or dishwasher will pay extra for the more versatile model. It's all good - not everything needs to be homogenized like PCs were for a good run.

Oh, so that's why Obama's justice department sued to prevent T-Mobile from merging with AT&T.