On Wed, Jul 9, 2025 at 12:50 PM Geoff Steckel <g...@oat.com> wrote:
> What do people use for long term/archival storage? > Tape, while traditional, can be very expensive. > Should I replace my large pile of portable USB drives? > I keep my archival storage online, shared via a read-only NFS mount. It makes the archive easier to search and to update. And disks are relatively cheap. The archive is backed up to LTO tape using dump(8). The latest generations of LTO drives are expensive but older ones can be bargains. An LTO4 or LTO6 tape drive will read and write LTO3/LTO4, and LTO5/LTO6 tapes respectively. I usually get around 800GB on an LTO4 tape and 2.3TB on an LTO6 tape. The backup tapes are stored many miles away; a fire that can destroy my server would also easily destroy any tapes that were stored next to it. It's unfortunate that dump(8) can't encrypt dump tapes. I'm aware that you can dump to a pipe and encrypt that, but then you lose the ability to easily span a dump across multiple tapes. I know there are other options but I really prefer to do my backups using only the tools in the base system, as that means I only need the tools in the base system to do a restore. -ken
