Have any of you worked in a place that uses tape as storage? Was this ever common in personal computers? Apparently IBM still sells these but where are they used? Any oldfags just want to reminisce, would love to hear it
>>108020066Yes still is the way any serious backup is done btw check out LTO 9. Nothing rivals them.Where are they used? Any serious business backing up mail and ERP databases and VMs, banks you name it. Cloud backup is and always will be a retarded spastic tech for badly run shitshows it simply cannot match the backup and recovery time of a fibrechannel connected LTO drive..
>>108020066You've never really worked in IT have you?
>>108020066let me guess you fell for the cloud mememany such retards
>>108020066I goess you think some 200 mbs cloud backup rivals this?|"For LTO generation 10, the LTO Program has balanced the cost and benefit of new technology by offering two cartridges, with 30 TB and 40 TB native capacity, to address current and future demands for storage space. These capacities can rise to 75 TB and 100 TB respectively with a 2.5:1 compression ratio. LTO-10 40 TB cartridges provide a 122% capacity boost over LTO–9 and a 1,500% increase over LTO-6 technology, launched just over a decade ago, with maximum transfer speeds of 400 MBps (native) and 1,200 MBps (compressed at 2.5:1 using the 32Gb Fibre Channel interface)."
>>108020066hp storageworks, client on each sever, tape runs at night and sucks up everything, tape goes in a offsite fireproof safe
How slow are these things? It would be pretty cool to back up my NAS incase it shits the bed
>>108020066Tape is primarily used as a backup medium. There is no other use for tape as it is slow as shit.The only time tape had prevalence in day to day computing is when computers used tape in like the 50s, which as mentioned was slow as shit but was the best they had back then.To some extent, floppy disks were kinda an evolution of tape, which was made obsolete by the compact disc, which was then made obsolete by flash storage.
>>108020130Why do you think I asking about it>>108020111>>108020135>>108020147The only time I have seen tape mentioned is in memory hierarchy pyramids and there is not really any consumer version of tape drives that are talked about. Never had to think about memory that much since I haven't really done anything serious that would warrant that.
>>108020111Tape is great fanastic brilliant>no robotFuck now I need to tard wrangle some guy at the DC>mailing tapes offsiteGod I hate the postal services and couriers.>doing DR exerciseslow as molassesTapes themselves are fine everything else about them sucks ass.
>>108020202>>108020225You forgot lots of 8 bit home computers (Atari and Commodore for example) used audio cassette tapes as their main storage medium. A tape is still a tape. Yepp it was slow and sucked balls but it worked.
>>108020250>You forgot lots of 8 bit home computersYes, the 50s ^_________^
>>108020250Did not know that. I did come across computer in pic though that has games on cassettes, pretty cool
>>108020225so yes you have never worked in IT
>>108020202>The only time tape had prevalence in day to day computing is when computers used tape in like the 50s, which as mentioned was slow as shit but was the best they had back then.nothing to do with LTO tapes whatsoever and worked fine but not even digital, irrevenent to LTOs>>108020190Fibre Channel very very fast>>108020202>Tape is primarily used as a backup mediumDur hurr?>>108020230Fireproof safe offsite, only stiff that we ever couried was going into long term vaulted storage>>108020250>You forgot lots of 8 bit home computers (Atari and Commodore for example) used audio cassette tapes as their main storage medium. A tape is still a tape. Yepp it was slow and sucked balls but it worked.ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH LTOS THEY RECORDED MOSULATED AUDIO AND WORKED FINE>>108020330NOTHING TO DO WITH MTO DRIVES SEE ABOVEEVERY SINGLE FUCKING THING IN YOUR AZURE AND AWS AND GOOGLE DATACENTRES GOOES ON LTO AS DOES EVERY OTHER THING YOU HAVE EVER USED.
Durr hurr I have never worked in IT durr hurr tapes must be old what is they even for dis LTO thing.Jesus wept.
>>108020230>>no robotFibre Channel LTO tape chagers with magazines have been around froever and they were never particularly expensiveYou have either worked with stuff like blade server chassis, LTO, fibre channel switches and sans or you have not. None of this stuff is 'old' or obsolete or ever was, from datacentres to SMEs worth a shit it is how stuff get's backed up, now and for the last 20 years
More jeet infosec 'experts' who don't know what an SSD or an LTO or fibre channel is or zoomers. I can't tell the difference as they both rely on the first page of search results for their knowledge.No blow your minds and discover LTO autoloaders, blade servers and chassis and fibre channel switches and SANsPretty much anywhere with move than a hundred staff uses this stuff. There are pretty serious legal requirements for audited companies to preserve financial records as well as other legal requirements and insurer requirements as well as disaster recovery. Everywhere uses LTOs to back up data, from the biggest datacentres, even ones coloating all the way down. I don't know what the fuck is going to happen when my generation retires. Civilisational collapse maybe.
>>108021242That's great and all but have you ever worked on an actual mainframe? Non of the things you said are anything special to anyone who manages hardware in IT
>>108021290Yes I have actually, I worked in banking as well. It's amazing to learn that this board is actually packed with people who have never even worked in IT.
>>108021242Pic not mine, but this is “tape” nowadays. It’s all SSD, but it’s “virtual tape” so mainframe applications access it in the same way as they would use a robotic library. BC/DR capabilities are via async replication to same model VTS at second data center sites.
>>108021370What's the practical difference between DAT and DLT tapes
>>108021390Not it is not 'Tape' tape is fucking tape and it is still tape. Stop spewing nonsense. LTO is just as much part of enterprise and datacentre IT as it ever was.>>108021390>BC/DR capabilities are via async replication to same model VTS at second data center sites.See this. >>108021242>Everywhere uses LTOs to back up data, from the biggest datacentres, even ones coloating all the way down.yes you just repeated the phrase colocating.I give up. This thread is riddled with jeets.
>>108021415Why the fuck are you asking me something that retarded? I don;t even see where the fuck you are coming from, a fuckiing sinclair microdrive is a 'tape' a beatamax robotic library in an old school broadcast studio is a 'tape' none of which has fuck all to do with the fact that LTOs have been and are the predominant backup and archiving in IT for two fucking decades.
>>108021433Cause my mainframe came with both a DAT and DLT drive
>>108021242>No blow your minds and discover LTO autoloaders, blade servers and chassis and fibre channel switches and SANsThere is so much cool tech, so much insane hardware, as soon as you step into the real world and real companies handling real data, not some app startup or jeet mudhut "engineer".>t. my old employer had their own airplane crash proof data center where you had 20 seconds to get to an oxygen mask when the fire alarm went off, then the whole fire cell was vented and filled with inert gas to put out the fire and guarantee uptime>Yes I know this is standard as fuck but zoomers and jeets don't
>>108021494They are there so it could access older backups. DAT is vastly inferior to DLT which is the precursor to LTO 1
>>108021504I actually know one greefield where a night shift cleaner who went into a do not enter freon/argon room for a cheeky cigarette who was found dead on the floor, poor old gal.Racks can buirn with unbelievable heat when they go up though.Anyhow for the non jeets, this is not old or obsolete tech. LTO 10 is state of the art and tape will always be around because you can't vault anything else and there is no competition to tape for that. It's also the fastest way to move e.g 1000 TB internationally.
why are tape drives so expensive? Holy shit they're like 5,000 dollars. And the tapes themselves aren't exactly cheap either. Granted, HDDs have gone up in price recently, but just a year or two ago I snagged a bunch of server HDDs for like 50 dollars per 8TB. Yeah, the tapes are strictly speaking still a little cheaper than that per gig, but not by terribly much, and you don't need to spend thousands on a device to read them. You don't need to worry about temperature/humidity control, they're plug-and-play, seeking isn't linear and requires physically spooling tape, and so on. Still really neat though. I'm sure the calculus is far more in LTO's favor for actual mass storage on a corporate level, but for individuals and small businesses, I'm just not seeing it.
>>108021574buy used and older gen, it's sme enterprise gear. You should see what a fully loaded state of the art new blade chassis costs. The tape can be reused over and over. You'll probably need a head cleaning tape as well if you go used HP is the premium brand for LTO a lot of other brands is just rebadged HP>>108021504https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEsWIl0yPp8
>>108021574>expensive>5kAnon each warm body occupying a chair in the office has a yearly fully loaded cost 50x of that tape drive
>>108021632refer to last paragraph. I'm sure it's worth it for large corporations. For individual use, it's neat but impractical. But moreover, why is it so expensive? Like what machinery inside costs that much to produce? Some tape heads?
>>108021660It's not expensive and a reasonably tiny business with 100-200 staff will be turning over 30 million a year or go broke pretty fast
>>108021632Look for an older gen LTO that does wht you need, like LTO 5,6,7 or something. YOU're not going to be playing with LTO 8/9/10 on a home setup. You'll also need software.
>>108021683What is inside that costs 5000 to make
>>108021724Are you a fucking jeet? Really?
>>108020111Which companies are running internal erotic roleplaying sessions then?
>>108021515It also came with an open reel drive so you are probably right
>>108020250https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_G927EokrE
>>108021415>What's the practical difference between DAT and DLT tapesAbout 796GB. In favour of DLT.Also, one lays down helical vs linear and the extra width of the DLT allows for greater xfer rate...>>108021504>the whole fire cell was vented and filled with inert gas to put out the fire and guarantee uptimeMade me think o that halon test where it evac'd that fast the sound pressure wrecked the HD's in the building...
>>108020066I did some work for a burglar alarm monitoring company, they used tape backups for all the alarm/response data. Once a day a huge old lesbian lady would waddle into the server room and swap in a new tape.
>>108021419>LTO is just as much part of enterprise and datacentre IT as it ever was.It left my company’s data centers about 15 years ago. You’re coming across as either desktop support or unemployed, but either way “enterprise IT” is such an odd larp for you to have chosen.
>>108020066was gonna get into those, but then i started backups on blu-rays instead, back in 2015 it was cheaper to store on 25gb blu-rays than it was on HDD when it came to $ per GBnow 10+ years later all the data is still accessible, even the earlier copies that had no data redundancy or where i didnt put the CDs in "raid" sadly backing up on CDs has become very none economical, dont think anyone under 30 has a single disc at their home anymore
>>108023901forgot to say that LTO10 has like 45 TB cardridges, would love to use those if the drive didnt cost 10k
>>108020066Yes but that was in the mid 90s. C-level employees and VPs had tape drives in their PCs so their hard drives could be backed up frequently. Doubt that lasted very far past 2000, when centralized file servers became common for high value document retention.
>>108021574They’re mechanically complex. The tape moving through them is running between 4 and 10 m/s, and mustn’t get jammed, twisted or damaged. I’ve taken one of these drives apart, and besides the fact they weigh a ton, they’re full of bearings, weird fiddly little mechanisms to guide the tape and they’re basically impossible to repair. They also are expected to last a decade+ being run fairly regularly (most tape libraries have 2-4 actual drives, and just store the rest of the tapes)
>>108021719You don’t, these drives show up as SCSI tape devices. On Linux you just write onto them with tar. The newer ones are easier to work with, since they have a pseudo file system that makes use of a second metadata track, but the old ones are just devices you write one long string of bytes to. You use mt to seek, rewind and eject, or sg3 to issue more specific commands (like writing to the RFID metadata chip on newer tapes)
>>108021138Magnetic tape is magnetic tape. Take ur fuckin meds, sperg.
>>108020250in my second grade classroom we had a commodore PET computer that we played gen 1 Oregon Trail on, which we loaded from the cassette deck
>>108021553>It's also the fastest way to move e.g 1000 TB internationally"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"-Andrew S. Tanenbaum
>>108021101Lmao he hasn’t. He just reads about IT work online apparently. And yes I’ve used tapes for data backups at my last job. Was kino sitting in the server room chilling and managing the backup jobs and getting the tapes ready to be sent off to Iron Mountain for storage.
The original IBM PC had a cassette interface, but it just never took off and was quickly removed.https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/what-happened-to-the-cassette-interface-from-the-ibm-5150.46242/
>>108020066tapes are still the most cost effective backup option on the marketI ran an LTO4 setup for a finance company for about 5 years while I was there, we used Iron Mount for offsite storagewe used Microsoft DPM for awhile but it was ass
>>108020066When I was a kid one of my relatives took me around their work (tax and import duties) they had tape machines like these I liked watching
Is there any benefit to backing up legal data on tape for persistent storage?We have user access logs that need to be retained indefinitely and currently they're on HD, which is objectively wrong, and so I have to pick a lossless compression, encryption, and burn them all onto either disks or some other media. This is just so that in 5 years time we can prove who accessed our terminals in case we ever need to sue someone for leaking proprietary data from production machines, which don't even have a terminal interface. Printing duplicates then physically posting them to Chinese factories.
>>108026696>tfw you have no lto library and robot to automatically insert and remove tapes from drives
