I saw this video a while back, surprised tape backup was still a thing for medium sized businesses and enterprises:

So I started thinking about the best way to store things like captures of childhood videos and other precious data. I have a few external hard drives, but one died and I can't format it anymore across multiple PCs or operating systems. Plus hard drives have an official shelf life of about 5 years.

I put that on the back burner for a while and came across some home videos a friend wanted captured. I played those back and was amazed at how some of those VHS tapes that were recorded in 1986 through the 1990s had held up. That's 34 years!! I then looked at another home video from a family member recorded in 1990, with the same amazing result. Picture is great and sound is crystal clear.

Coming up on a possible 8mm film transfer project from my grandmother's side of the family, I again revisited tape backups in hopes of preserving the memories for another 30 years. I was lucky to find a good eBay deal that includes a drive and some gently used 3TB LTO5 tapes to get me started. I'm installing this puppy in my gaming PC, complete with HBA card.

Is anyone else buying these tape systems on the secondhand market for home use?

Hard drives are getting cheaper, but are they really that reliable for long term archiving (20+ years)?

Also found this:

My stuff came in. Now I need to read up on how to connect it all up. Anyone else do this type of work? How long do these LTO tapes really last?

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Not mechanical issues, but they do wear out as you write to them. But so do tapes and hard drives, they just wear mechanically. SSDs wear electrically, if that makes sense.

I'm storing my tapes indoors (my house).

I would think you would still need to power the SSD from time to time to prevent the electrons in the cells from leaking out, losing the data.

I work in IT and we see old tape backup stuff come in from time to time. I considered getting one from a client's recycle pile, but it was SCSI only and probably LTO3 or LTO4. I was able to find my equipment due to a company closing from coronavirus and selling off the stuff at liquidation prices. In addition to getting a good deal, I'm also glad I was able to help their cause financially.

Although a lot more convenient, cloud storage is actually backed by tape:

The Seagate drives don't seem to be as reliable as they were 15 years ago. I've seen issues with them personally too vs. other brands.

Welp, I don't have a free PCI-E slot. I'll need to try this in another PC I have.

Not interested in cloud storage, plus don't have the upload speed for that anyway.

I'm considering storing audio on VHS long term. The format's track record for longevity and Hi-Fi's capability of reproducing audio are both fantastic. I can't see an SSD or hard drive lasting this long for archival audio storage. A 2 hour long FLAC file can be pretty big, and tapes and VCRs are still cheap. You don't even need blank tapes, just buy used ones off eBay and erase them. They don't even have to be high grade tapes. I'm also looking for some software that will save a FLAC file as a video stream simultaneously.

I used to think CDs and DVDs had good longevity until after about 10 years so or I started having issues with some discs becoming unreadable due to rot. I do have some BD-Rs though and I haven't been able to test those for longevity yet.

I think my strategy will end up being DVDs or Blu-rays and VHS/LTO tapes as a second level backup. I don't trust hard drives as much as I used to. I see drives with 5 years of age or less develop bad sectors on the surface of the platters.

Here's what I figure. If 30 year old consumer formats like VHS, compact casette, and 8-track are still retaining information, imagine what enterprise grade LTO tapes can do.

True, it happens with any media. Just seems in my experience that the reliability of any tape format has outperformed other methods I have tried over the years.

Finally got the tape drive installed. Installed Windows 7, just need the drivers for the HBA card and drive itself, followed by the HP StoreOpen software.

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For the initiated, I would advise against using Windows. I spent probably a good 2 hours trying to get this to work under Windows. I started with Windows 7 because it doesn't suck and some of the OEM tools and drivers were more likely to work with Windows 7 (being that LTO-5 came out as a standard in 2010). First of all I had to install my HBA card driver from LSI. No problems there. Then I had to install an older version of .NET Framework and Visual C++ Redistributable 2010 for the Quantum LTFS driver and tools. But alas, this did not start and cited the LTFS Management Service wasn't running. Tried to start the service, this failed. I checked the event log and found out the NT kernel was blocking the driver from being loaded due to driver signature enforcement.

So I turned off driver signature enforcement, and the service and LTFS tools are now running. Great, but my tape drive was not listed in the Quantum LTFS manager. I found out it's listed as a tape drive in Device Manager, but the driver was listed as "unavailable." So I found and installed the only driver for HP LTO-5 drives I could find on their site. Rebooted and... blue screen crashes every time. To boot up, I had to turn driver signature enforcement back on so no drivers would load. And now I'm stuck.

So I considered trying this with Windows 10, which I despise. However, I first decided to try Linux Mint. Much to my surprise my HBA card and tape drive all work out of the box and the expected st0, nst0, etc. device files showed up under /dev/. I then messed around with the mt ("magnetic tape") utility and used dd to read and write some files sequentially. Everything worked flawless and I'm getting 100MB/s+ reads in Linux and about 70MB/s writes. I only used test files of a few hundred MBs, so those numbers aren't truly accurate.

Now, I'm aware of LTFS on Linux. But from what I can tell I would have to compile it myself, do some even more involved stuff with the terminal, make sure block size and UTF-8 formatting are correct, etc. Whatever "filesystem" is used by the Linux tape driver by default is very crude, as expected, but reliable and effective. Just like back in the 90s with Unix machines, I prefer to bundle up all my small files as tarball archives or just write large files sequentially to tape using the terminal as-is.

I also printed some basic instructions on how to do this so if future me ever needs to do a recovery, the information is all there.
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I already had Linux Mint installed on this machine for a VHS decode project, and the files I want to archive are already there. I just changed hard drives when testing Windows. I've used Ubuntu, and Mint is based on it. I really dont like Ubuntu nowadays due to Gnome, Amazon being preinstalled, and extra telemetry that Linux Mint doesn't have.

I did my first tape backup. A 23GB tar file with no LTFS. Just me, the terminal, the tape tools, and syntax from the 1970s. Probably only took about 5 minutes. My drive stayed cool but the HBA card got warmer than I liked so I put a small fan next to the case during the write.

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This will be a fun experiment.

https://jakeludington.com/2005/08/28/back_files_to_d

So this is very interesting. This version of the software isn't publicly available yet. I have a bunch of old compact casettes lying around I have no other use for.

Wow, didn't see this one coming:

Also not really tape, but I decided to try ZIP100 disks for long term photo archiving. I have 14 of those on order along with a USB external drive. I was lucky to snag all of that for less than $50 shipped before taxes. If I can avoid the "click of death" I think being magnetic, ZIP discs will be a good third media option tor long term JPG photo archival.

I also learned I can convert them to JXL files to save 30% on file sizes using lossless compression. JPEG XL is also an open standard and gaining adoption, and is fully backward compatible with the legacy JPEG format my hundreds of family photos are in.

What give some hope about ZIP is there are examples on YouTube of disks and drives being stored in a covered box in a garage, plus a move, over about 20 years and most of the disks still read fine. That's impressive. Better than hard drives or optical media. And if the drive ever does die I can buy parts drives for well under $20.

So I also found out my dad has 2 SuperDisk LS-120 drives. One was pulled from a PC between 15 and 20 years ago, and the other is in a USB enclosure designed for use with Macs. I disassembled the enclosure and found they are both the same IDE/ATAPI drive made in Japan by the same manufacturer (I don't believe the drives themselves were made by Imation or 3M). I slapped the other internal drive in an IDE USB hard drive caddy. Both drives work, one works flawlessly and the other struggles a bit when reading, but it does successfully read. I'm going to clean the laser mirror and lenses and see if that improves. Oh, and the one disk I tested with works 100% as well. I took multiple images with both of these drives and they were both identical with no missing sectors that I could see.

So again, magnetic media continues to impress me. I guess my ultimate redundant multi-format hydra approach will be:

1. M-Disc Blu-ray (for large files such as videos and small files such as photos and documents)
2. ZIP Disk (small files such as photos and documents)
3. SuperDisk (small files such as photos and documents)
4. Floppy disk (mainly documents, may be possible to store JPEG-XL files, which have 20% smaller lossless file sizes than JPEG)
5. LTO-5 tape (for large files such as videos)

I tried all 14 of a random collection of ZIP disks I found on eBay. It was altogether about $2 per disk. About 10 of these are brand new, with the "50 Ways to Use Your ZIP Disk" demo EXE file and nothing else on the new disks. Verified no "deleted" data was on them, confirming they were new.

One disk had some legal documents from 1998 (can't believe the previous owner didn't format that one). Another has a set of ZIP utilities for Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and Windows NT. The third disk has some HP printer drivers from the year 2000. The fourth one has a partial Norton ZIP Rescue backup of his computer from 2001 with no personal files but it has a bunch of kids games. Maybe it was for kid's computer. I took a full image of a few disks and skipped that for the blank ones. I did scrub through the blank ones a bit with a hex editor with no issues.

This was all recovered with zero unreadable sectors on an internal IDE ZIP drive from 1999 and ZIP disks from 1997, with data that is 25 years old. From an archival standpoint that is VERY impressive.

If you still have ZIP disks and no drive to read them, I may consider data recovery. PM me if you want.