I still use optical discs for my personal backups and have done since 95. My biggest concern is whether I will still be able to buy new drives and blank media in 10, 20 years. Or physical media at all...
Please do not say LTO tapes. The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).
I’m in a similar boat. The USB to SATA adapter has kept my 5.25” drive going for quite a few years.
Some of my discs are hitting a decade and I am about to create a new set of backups. The market is smaller but the portable blu ray drives are becoming the default now.
So far I’ve just kept extra discs on hand plus a backup portable drive. Hopefully blu ray discs will manage to stick around as long as writable dvds.
You can still buy brand new LTO-4 and up from a brief search - I think due to the enterprise use cases it’ll hang around longer than any other format. Tape existed before the HDD; it’ll be there watching HDDS pass away into the ether too. Probably a few tape drives on the Starship Enterprise somewhere.
More seriously; you can buy used lto-7/8 for very little these days, and the tapes are extremely cheap per gb. The drives are somewhat loud; it’s not a beside device for sure. I’m finding it a bit of a pain to manage a good backup strategy with them.
You put exactly why I said do not mention LTO
- You suggest buying multidecade old drives that are no longer manufactured, have weird interfaces that your 2026 PC no longer has, are expensive, large, noisy
- You then mention LTO7 which will not read your LTO4 tapes and is not just expensive but literally out of reach economically for single home
Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes). Or you have so much data to backup that cost of drives is not really an issue.
Using HDDs for backup is also a terrible long term strategy, because you must have a lot of money regularly, to buy new HDDs to replace your old HDDs and this much more often than you need to buy a tape drive to migrate your tapes.
I have stored a lot of data on HDDs, and the only reason why I have not lost any of it yet is because I have always used duplicate HDDs. After 5 years or more, most HDDs had some corrupted sectors, but they were not in the same positions in the duplicate HDDs, allowing complete recovery of the data.
The reality is that both tapes and HDDs suck. What is really needed for long-term storage is a write-once memory with a lifetime of 100 years or more, based on an open standard that would ensure the availability of readers in the future.
If such a memory would use optical reading, it would have to use a great number of layers, filling a 3D volume, in order to achieve densities comparable with the magnetic media. While several research projects in this direction have been announced from time to time, until now none of them has resulted in a commercial product.
HDD cost small dollars and low skill.
Expecting even a nerdy user to successfully restore something from a cobbled together LTO setup is prepper nonsense.
HDD cost small dollars only for small amounts of archived data, i.e. up to 100 TB or 200 TB at most.
For greater amounts of data, HDDs become too expensive and this is the main reason to switch to tapes.
Obviously, for someone who is certain of never needing more than a few tens of TB of storage space it would be foolish to use LTO.
On the other hand, for someone storing 500 TB, it is foolish to use HDDs, because tapes are more reliable, more compact, faster for sequential transfers, i.e. the actual backup and restoring, and cheaper.
It is as simple as that. The decision of using HDDs or LTO is strictly determined by the amount of data that must be stored.
The argument that HDDs should be fine for most non-technical people is correct only because those people do not store much data.
99.9% of home users looking for long term backup solutions have less than 100TB of data.
I'm confused - I and many others basically have these cobbled together LTO setups. I'm only "Prepping" by finally moving some of my backups away from home, so in case of a fire or whatever I'm not out of luck. You could cobble one together now for anything from OG DAT tape to LTO-10 for ~10K, if you need. So big fire happens, you file an insurance claim, and as part of the payout buy whatever setup you need, or hire some specialists. Once we are at LTO-20, there's no reason to assume LTO-10 and older drives are totally gone from the used market?
I'm not preparing for some asteroid impact level event, in that case the loss of my backups will presumably not really matter all that much.
That’s babble to 80% of the nerdy HN audience. “Copy your stuff to this usb drive and keep it somewhere you aren’t” is easy for almost anyone to comprehend, accessible but operationally difficult.
> That’s babble to 80% of the nerdy HN audience.
Maybe you're having issues with their writing style or something but the tech is simple. They copy their stuff to a tape and keep it somewhere they aren't. If a disaster happens they'll buy a new tape drive.
Nothing weird. No "prepper nonsense".
Won't they just get binned by a future generation anyway, like Aunt Shirley's carefully-preserved collection of 35mm film negatives?
I bought a thunderbolt to FC adapter; works perfectly on Mac and Linux.
I mention LTO 4 because you can today, buy multi decades old LTO-4. Brand new. So in multiple decades from now, I assume you’ll be able to find LTO-7 or 8; brand new. A drive might cost a little more to obtain, but given the plethora of used multi decades old lto currently out there, it seems reasonable to expect that in a recovery scenario you’ll be able to shell out for the right drive.
But yes for most HDDs or the cloud are better. No need to get spicy about it.
I'm not going to actually suggest LTO-7, but what do you think is a reasonable per-month cost for backing up your important data? If it's in the $5-$10 range then you can afford a $600 drive and some tapes.
> Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes).
"regularly" can be 10 years. Your new equipment doesn't need to read your old tapes. If you advance by 4 generations, you can buy 1 new tape to replace 10 old tapes. And the newer generations have abandoned that feature anyway.
AFAIK the tapes are cheap, but tape libs aren't. Considering that they also take up a significant amount of space, I personally don't see them as a viable backup medium for most private users.
You don't necessarily need a lib, though. Especially if you're interested in a use case where you can store data in a go bag, safe deposit box, etc., it seems like having individual tapes would be preferable.
Individual used drives aren't too expensive (or at least didn't used to be). Libraries, in contrast, do tend to be more expensive (and also a lot more trouble to ship).
> The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).
Sure but old drives are widely available at low prices.
This is true - I got a fiber channel LTO-8 FH drive off ebay brand new in the IBM packaging for less than 750$ Tapes are 60; so breaking even against 15$ per TB HDDs is pretty fast.
No, they are not. Specially when you have to find the one drive that will read your tapes , connect to your computer, and many other constraints that a user will have.
The connection to a computer does not have any special challenges, except that the computer must be a desktop with a free PCIe slot.
Unless you have a server motherboard with an on-board SAS controller, you need to buy a SAS HBA card, put it in your desktop and also buy a compatible SAS cable, in order to connect an LTO tape drive to the computer.
New tape drives are extremely expensive, e.g. $4500 for the last generation of LTO-9 tapes (18 TB/cartridge), but if you store at least a few hundred TB of data you recover the cost of the drive from the cost difference between HDDs and tape cartridges.
I have an older LTO-7 (6 TB/cartridge) tabletop drive, which has cost me $3000 about 7 or 8 years ago (new), and there are several years since I have recovered its cost.
If you do not intend to store more than 100 TB, the cheapest solution is to buy external HDDs, but for long term storage you must plan to migrate the data periodically, as the lifetime of HDDs is hard to predict and unlikely to be much greater than 5 years.
I was genuinely confused by your comment so I went looking on ebay.
Why are they so expensive now? they used to be dirt cheap
The larger issue with tapes is that the small magnetic domains don't hold data as long as the mechanical changes in optical disks.
The tapes are guaranteed for 30 years.
Most optical discs do not have any guarantees about lifetime and the worst of them may survive only a few years.
There have existed special quality optical discs with gold mirrors that were guaranteed for 100 years, but those are no longer produced and a single modern tape cartridge stores as much data as thousands of those discs.
There are several mechanisms of degradation of optical discs. If the plastic does not seal well enough the metallic mirror, the metal can become oxidized and transparent, so it no longer reflects enough of the laser light. This is why certain archival discs used gold mirrors, which cannot oxidize. The plastic resin may also degrade in various ways and cause disc deformation.
Any guarantee made by manufacturer about data on tape longevity is irrelevant unless it is easy for user to create the storage conditions under which is warranted, and that is usually not cheap.
not hard to find stories about data on LTO tapes being unreadable after 5 years. The same as stories of data on even the worst CD-Rs being still readable after 30 years ( i can personaly attest to that).
Some CD-Rs will certainly be readable after 30 years, but there have been plenty of bad CD-Rs that have become unreadable after less than 10 years.
I had several hundred CD-Rs. Most of them were OK, especially the gold archival CD-Rs from Kodak, so I have migrated the data from them mostly to save space and improve access speed, not for them being too old. Nevertheless there have been a few that have gone bad, but I had duplicates for all of them, so I did not lose the data. Had I not been cautious, I would have lost some of the data.
The main problem of optical discs is their much too low capacity in comparison with magnetic media. A small suitcase with tape cartridges contains as much data as a big cabinet full of the most dense optical discs.
The CD-Rs had an active organic layer that oxidizes, even if the mirror is gold. Some kind of rewritables weren't organic as far as I remember.
Also CD-Rs have the active layer (top) exposed to the air, but that was solved with DVDs which are a sandwich (which though caused its own issues with shearing)
New drives must read and write the previous generation of tapes and they must read the tape generation that was before the previous.
Which is disgrace when you consider that no optical drive is yet available that will not read original red book cd roms from the 80s.
You say "it can read from one generation ago" as if it was some great thing about LTO when it is just a laughably fast obsolescence policy and what really kills it for a home user.
A blueray drive manufactured today can still fscking write to a 90s CD-R from way before LTO even existed.
That is easy for optical drives, because there is no direct relationship between the size of bits on the optical track and the dimensions of the read/write laser head.
For magnetic media, the gaps in the magnetic circuit of the read/write heads are optimized for a certain dimension of the bits from the tape material and the efficiency of the read/write process greatly diminishes for other bit sizes.
So there is no obsolescence policy, but there is a real technical difficulty in ensuring compatibility with older magnetic media with different bit densities.
That is not that simple. There is a relationship between laser and media, most optical drives to this day have entirely separate lasers for different generations of media. At the very least, red vs blue lasers.
It is not as simple as claiming that optical drives have it easier technologically. If anything, I would claim that tapes have it simpler, definitely for reading at least. There is _nothing_ preventing LTO from retrocompatibility other than market forces.
That's not true anymore.
> The drives are huge
You can get 5.25" bay drives.
I believe they are all 5.25in, some are just in a case. Even the library drives are just two 5.25 bays put together, a full height drive; vs. the much more common half height.
> Please do not say LTO tapes.
Literally every single reply to this comment mentions LTO; never change HN.
> Literally every single reply to this comment mentions LTO
So "mentions LTO" is true, but:
3 of the comments were disagreeing with claims OP made about LTO. That's a reasonable way to respond even when OP doesn't want to use LTO.
1 of the comments was saying something bad about LTO.
1 comment was really advocating LTO.
I specifically said do not mention LTO because I knew it would happen. LTO-advocates fail to see how pointless LTO is for someone who is well-served by a backup/archival strategy that uses optical media.
When I say "I'm concerned about whether I could buy newly manufactured drives and media in 10,20 years", the answer cannot possibly be "LTO". Because in order for LTO to make any economical sense, I would have to buy ancient LTO drives, and ancient LTO media compatible with those drives, and ancient computers compatible with the interfaces used by those drives.
Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then?
Compare this to BD where in at least today you can buy a simple and cheap USB drive and new media, all of them manufactured today, and not break the bank while doing so. And drives have evolved from $propietary->PATA->SATA->USB, keeping up with the times and interfaces. (Interestingly, I can also buy newly manufactured USB 3.5inch floppy drives. But not media.)
I mean, certainly LTO has its advantages, but in the same way that someone requiring to archive 8TB of data would likely screech if asked to do so with BD media, it just doesn't make sense to suggest LTO as a long-term alternative here.
Really the one thing that's guaranteed to be manufactured in N years is _some kind of storage_. I wouldn't buy LTO-1 now, but later gens are going to be around for some time, just like CD-ROMs and other optical media, in some form. And readers will always exist barring an asteroid impact or whatever.
>Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then?
You can still buy brand new LTO-1 media from 2000 - 26 years old. You shouldn't, but you can. https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_1... Then here's a cheap drive https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408
So if you needed to restore a backup from 26 years ago, it would not cost you very much.
This is just yet another example of a pointless argument, exactly as I mentioned. Why should I even care that you can scavenge for ancient stock (even if NOS), when my current concern is about something that is still manufactured _today_ ?
I know for sure optical media & DRIVES will still be available to purchase _brand new_ during the N years they're still manufactured, but also the M years that will follow where I will be able to find new/old stock after they stop manufacturing.
Period N by itself I expect is going to be somewhat long (see 3.5inch floppies), during which one can even expect to see drives with never interfaces (e.g. USB-C). Yes, I have no clue how long it is really going to be, and my concern is whether it will even last this decade.
OTOH I know 100% for sure period N is going to be effectively 0 for any LTO generation I could possibly buy. By the time LTO prices drop for some generation, it is because that generation is dead in the water.
And period M? It is going to incredibly long for optical due to popularity alone, much longer than _any generation_ of LTO could ever hope to be.
And if you say "well, certainly some form of LTO is going to be manufactured in 20 years from now": it should be obvious that I couldn't care less, unless that form of LTO would be able to read the tapes from any generation I can possibly buy now.
The fact that LTO-21 will still be manufactured is of absolutely no relief to someone with LTO-4 tapes. In fact, for all I'm concerned, it could very well be an entirely different media type only sharing the first three letters of the name.
These are not arguments in favor of LTO. If you're already assuming that if your LTO drive breaks you either scavenge for another or basically assume the loss and buy all new media from newer generation and repeat... what's the point of LTO then? Why not buy SmartMedia cards (to say the worst thing that comes to mind)? I'm sure you can scavenge readers and media, and probably will have an easier time finding and using them than with any specific LTO generation.
In the meanwhile, let me keep burning toasters; at least there is a small chance I may be able to buy new drives 20 years from now, using whatever interface replaces USB-C, and they will still be able to read my current discs.
I mean you said it yourself: if you have terabytes of data, BD isn't practical.
I feel like this is all just two totally separate use cases. Nobody wants to burn 20-40 BDs per TB, just like nobody wants to use a tape drive (or maintain a RAID array, or whatever else) to back up 500GBs of family photos and tax documents or whatever.
At some point the volume of data dictates what solutions are practical.
Yeah, with you 100% here. It's all about the volume and use case.
HN is full of people who backup but never restore. Lol