Hey folks, being the family IT man I’ve held onto all of my families photos/videos over the last 20 years

I’ve been pretty careless with the backups and I know if I don’t do anything it’s only a matter of time before I lose them

Although I’ve never used them, tape drives seem to be the best so I thought I’d ask here if anyone uses them for their homelab?

It might be overkill for a few GB of photos but I’d also use the tape drives for data hoarding purposes so it’s a win win in my book

  • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    9 hours ago

    My advice is avoid tape backups. The cost, risk of media degredation, and management overhead make them not worth it, especially for a homelab.

    Also, restoring an entire VM is almost easier than recovering a single file, just because of the sequential nature of reading data from a tape. Data recoveries are pretty slow in general.

    I backup to an external hard drive with regular copies to iDrive S3. Been doing it that way for a number of years with no problems.

    • Unforeseen@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      22 minutes ago

      I’ve been using tape libraries since the early 2000’s and I agree I wouldn’t be bothered to have to deal with them in my homelab. Just having to manage rotations and so on… uuuugh no thanks.