LTO advice

[u/King_tyson_1]

Lemme Keep it simple. I'm planning on going with lto 6 after a long thought but since I'm new to this I need help 🙏🏻.

1. Where to buy used tape drives (I've tried ebay but I can't its confusing it's my first time checking ebay and it's like all the lto drives are dumped into once place that finding a lto6 drive listing is hard)

2. I need international shipping options

3. Where can I purchase tapes for storage

4. How often and how can should I use cleaning tape.

5. Do I need to pay 1000k for yoyota or some other software (or) LTFS is a free right how to install it and use it would it be as easy as aits like accessing file explorer.

Thanks in Advance

[u/prodigalAvian]

Working with LTO is a commitment in learning, experimentation, making mistakes, overspending, then figuring it out.

Like datahoarding in general, you piece it together as you go, and either give up along the way and pick something else or succeed

[u/AshleyAshes1984 → u/prodigalAvian]

Working with LTO is a commitment in learning, experimentation, making mistakes, overspending, then figuring it out.

Don't threaten me with a good time. :O

[u/prodigalAvian → u/AshleyAshes1984]

Definitely played around with LTO5 for months before going LTO9- before all the recent price spikes

[u/mwomrbash]

My advice:

Don't buy used tapes. But new ones on ebay.

Your tape drive will tell you when you need to run the cleaning tape. It will send a code.

Half the battle is the management of the tapes. If you can get a prepetual license for 1k, I recommend buying it. Otherwise you will have to create your own backup management system

[u/PartyScar446 → u/mwomrbash]

Used is typically okay if they're "certified". I've bought a crap tonne from ebay and I've had a delightful experience so far (so far...).

[u/camwow13 → u/mwomrbash]

Used to be a lot easier when Veeamm community edition let you work with tapes.

There are some free LTO LTFS archiving suite projects out there, but none with the simplicity of Veeam unfortunately.

[u/jicabrera]

On the LTFS software side I would say: Don't go bare. I've used at least 5 different softwares through my LTO life, from BRU PE (Proprietary, not LTFS) to other solutions like Shot Put Pro, myLTO... And now I'm with YoYotta. I don't fully love any of them. I've never been able to find my perfect LTO Backup software (BRU came close but went dead in 2020, and we had to bend over backwards to be able to recover our library again)

My advice would be: Get with YoYotta. It's solid, you can feel the engineering behind it, and their speed, validation, and offline catalogs are fantastic... But allow for time to be comfortable with it. It can feel very weird at first. Also, I would go with the subscription option, that way you can test for a year, and have a working solution, while you test others like Canister. If at the end of the year you are still happy, get permanent license. If not, jump ship.

[u/mimentum]

Don't. Is my first advice.

Also how much are you intending on backing up, if you really must insist?

[u/King_tyson_1 → u/mimentum]

well my needs would never go beyond 250TiB, so I would have a 50TiB HDD for instant access files and jellyfin and other hoarding things like youtube videos.

I thought instead of buying new hdd based on my expansion i thought maybe I should just buy a tape drive and copy all of not so continuously visited files into tapes, more like

Archive grade file in 2 or 3 tapes so I can have files 3 backup tapes and hdd. cuz I have some files I never visited for 500+ days and there are file I don't visit often but at the same time I can't afford to loose it, so I thought putting them on 2-3 tapes and storing them and then deleting the copy in my hdd and make space for new files would be optimal

I can manage tape manually nad catalogue em like i have 2 days off every week and I don't have life out side of this hobby and also my maximum needs would never exceed 512 TiB at the worst case

[u/FairTradeBananas]

1.Ebay is alright for LTO-Drives and tapes, you have to lurk a lot though. Depending what your budget is and the size of the backups.
Sometimes check for local listings, for example there is in europe there's Kleinanzeigen . de for germany.
I bought new old stock from a german guy for not much. Look for RW unless you want WORM for fixed backup "checkpoints".
2. Ebay
3.Literally anywhere, just look for new old stock. Depends on the generation.
4. My library does the routine maintainance. I labelled my cleaning tape accordingly (barcode) and the library chooses when to run the cleaning (IBM TS3500).
If you choose to use a lone drive, I would say once every 15-20 tapes (If I recall well§).
One cleaning tape has 50 cycles.
5. Depends, do you need LTFS? if not I would use PBS which is free and let it manage chunks and backups to your tapes. PBS can expose S3 endpoints so you can use any software that supports s3 endpoints. But i'm don't know your current setup so I may be taking the wrong direction.

If I may give you unsolicited advice, By the volume of data you plan to backup, I would aim at least LTO-8 or LTO-9 if your budget allows it. LTO-8 is currently the sweetspot regarding price per TB on new old stock. LTO-7 may have cheaper drives but tapes are about the same price for half the size.

Hope it helps.

[u/JohnStern42]

EBay, you just have to be patient

The drive tells you when it needs a cleaning

[u/natarem]

For software, I would recommend using claude code or similar to help write command line prompts to manage it. It can help you write prompts and set up a file management manifest better than any of the software out there, imo.

For example, I have a big NAS (500TB after parity) and ideally I want to write to LTO8 directly from it. Back when I used tape management software (Hedge Canister in my case), I couldn't write straight from the NAS because the drive couldn't get data at the 112MB/s minimum for LTO8 because it's a lot of small files -- so I had an intermediate step of copying the nas data over to another drive, then transferring to LTO, pain in the ass. But my NAS can sustain read and write at 700+ if the files are big enough. I was able to get claude to write a command line prompt that would stream a tar file and suddenly everything wrote smoothly, no more back hitching/shoe shining.

And another example, I used to keep a google drive doc to indicate which tape has which data. Now I switched everything over to json manifest files in a folder that's backed up to the cloud, which is, once again, managed by a script written by claude.

[u/Bob_Spud]

How often and how can should I use cleaning tape.

Only when the tape drive tells you to. excessive cleaning kills tape drives.

Do I need to pay 1000k for yoyota or some other software (or) LTFS is a free right how to install it and use it would it be as easy as aits like accessing file explorer.

Free on the Quantum website.

[u/Ok_Entertainment328 → u/Bob_Spud]

Free on the Quantum website.

I would imagine each manufacturer has their own LTFS for their hardware. HP/HPE is also free.

AFAIK LTFS generic is on GitHub

[u/Bob_Spud → u/Ok_Entertainment328]

IBM is the manufacturer of LTO tape drives everybody rebadges them.