Tape advice

[davidktw]

Cost of two raids would be equivalent to 1 LTO6 drive.
Just a home user wanting to back up sentimental videos.

Paying monthly recurring charges at usd200+ just doesnt seem appealing.
Im afraid of RAID rebuilts and catastrophic failures.

Just to give you an idea why LTO6 solution is appealing to me... I can reduce this amount of 3 yrs worth of miniDV tapes to just TWO LTO6 tapes! haha see pic below.

The videos are just for archive after I uploaded them to my website. I dont think I will need to access them at all. Maybe O just have a set of tapes for redundancy.

I will likely just build an NAS using synology 415+ as first layer of backup.

Since you deal with tapes before, what kind of tape failures can happen? total tape failure or just a section of 'bad sectors'?

I see, if it's not a business, then perhaps it doesn't justify the opex. Lets have a benchmark on the LTO6 drive. I would price it at around USD1.8K which would round up to roughly SGD2.4K based on the pricing found at http://www.backupworks.com/LTO-6-Ultrium-Tape-Drive.aspx. if you are using a different price benchmark, please highlight. I will assume if you get it locally, it will cost more.

When you said you can fit all the miniDV tapes into 2xLTO6, are you assuming at 6.25TB or 2.5TB. I remember video and audio contents are very compressible since they are already compressed. Do you have experience using LTO with your videos and you get good compression ratios ?

For tapes, I have experience setting up the process for clients, tape library, tapes, configure and so forth, bt I do not go through the long term operation. In any case, LTO tapes are very much like your audio tapes. They will suffer the same phenomenal like fungus due to moisture, but you can expect them to have much greater impact because the density of the surface is high and you are dealing with digital contents instead of just clicks noise in audio or video. digital tapes comes with ECC but if the affected areas are too large, I don't think it will rectify. If you keep without dry boxes, they will certainly last, how long, I won't be able to advise.

There are a few ways to do RAID together with using LVM. Basically you do not RAID all the disks together into one volume. To keep your risk down, you can build multiple arrays, like 2x volumes of "7xHDD RAID6" , then just pack these 2 volumes into one volume group. So in the event of a failure, it's only a volume that you are rebuilding. RAID 6 allows 2x failure before disaster in each volume.

These are just options, ultimately, please go and do the math and see which you are comfortable with.