Gadgetory

okay so obviously our devious plan to back up our entire petabyte server to Google drive's cheap unlimited tear was going to hit a snag at some point and from talking to Wendell over at level one text that point seems to be at about a hundred and fifty terabytes of storage when they start throttling you later so fine then it's okay because we had a back-up plan anyway why store your data in the cloud when you can store it on tapes Mack Weldon makes great underwear t-shirts socks wallets and more they believe in simple shopping and fuse code tech tips you'll get 20% off through the link below I'm wearing Mac loading underwear right now to show it to you I'd have to give myself a pre epic wedgie though like a front wedgie this is the Meg store TRB 3 - HL 8 a Thunderbolt 3 equipped tape reader that even in 2018 costs about 10 times more than your mom or dad's wife I did back in the 1980s yes my friends this puppy will run you about six thousand dollars for the single deck version or nine thousand for a dually so how on earth does that make any sense let's start this story by backing up a little bit so when I was growing up the way to archive data long term was using optical media so the CD was high on its victory over the cassette in the music industry I think I have a CD around here somewhere Oh anyway CDs were slow and inconvenient to create assuming that you could afford a CD burner at all but their massive capacity meant that compared to floppy disks oh I have those too compared to floppy disks and even zip disks you could store what felt like an unlimited amount of at least certain types of files because remember that a 1.44 megabyte floppy - formatting overhead could only store like a handful of even basic things like homework assignments over time though portable hard drives which have come down and cost dramatically over the last decade or two and cloud storage which is undeniably more convenient for small backup jobs have gradually displaced optical media in the booster shots that optical discs have gotten along the way like rewritable capabilities the capacity upgrades that DVD and blu-ray brought there's just there's just a practical limit to how small you can make the little bumps on these plastic and foil frisbees before the cost to make them just stops making sense but that doesn't mean that the expensive drive cheap media model is dead at all in fact all this time quietly in the background tape storage has been alive and well in the enterprise space with even modern super computers like the SFU cedar installation that we toured last year being equipped with state-of-the-art tape libraries this product is a little different though so it's the same actual drive that you would find in a data center they're actually all made by IBM these days and then rebadged so it's LTO 8 which means that each of your tapes is gonna have a total of 12 terabytes of storage now there is this 30 terabytes on here but that assumes that whatever data you're putting on it is highly compressible so that would not apply to the kind of media that we would be backing up in fact for most things very few people use it so 12 terabytes is really what you can count on and then it also means LTO 8 that we are compatible with either these LTO 8 tapes or LTO 7 normally you would get two generations of backwards compatibility but there was a materials change to barium ferrite that made that impractical this time around alright so why did they put all this work into creating a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for a tape drive well for people like me who have hundreds of terabytes of data but who don't necessarily need lightning fast access to it so what we're gonna do is give it a try now when I first set this up I actually did it on a Windows machine but quite frankly I wouldn't really recommend that it's not a fantastic experience there's this whole annoying rigmarole to get the drivers installed you have to disable driver signature enforcement you got to make some changes in the BIOS it's it's a real hassle but once you do get it working assuming that you can find an app that cooperates there are some driver issues on Windows as well it is a lot more painless than it used to be now in the old days with tape drives you used to have to take all the files that you wanted to archive wrap them up into another type of file called a dot tar file or a tar ball and then if you wanted to pull anything off of it you had to pull the whole thing off and then you could pick out the one file that you needed now it's basically drag and drop so whether you're using finder or Windows Explorer it's a much more seamless experience let's go ahead and load this puppy in doesn't that sound delightfully retro so takes like 30 seconds or so to initialize but we're just gonna enjoy those sounds together so the thing about tape is that it has to be read from and written to linearly there's no read/write head that can jump around on the media and obviously unlike solid-state storage it can't just grab an address and pull the data directly so you're gonna hear a lot of it reeling and unreeling tape whenever you use the thing so this is a piece of software called my LTO they have a more advanced version called pre-roll post that has a bunch of database features but basically what this is you don't strictly speaking needed but what it is is it's a piece of software for helping you keep all of your backups organized so in the event that you want to go back and pull like an old news story or something to refer back to it you know exactly where to go which labeled tape to pull and where exactly in the folder structure you would find the files that you're looking for it's going to take a couple minutes here to figure out exactly how much data is in this folder on our nas on the vault so this is pulling off a petabyte project so that took about 20 minutes but the bottleneck here is just our network connection to the vault so now we can go ahead and begin so as you get two breaks and files you're gonna hear it kind of rev down but in general we're able to do anywhere from about a hundred and fifty to two hundred and small change megabytes per second and that's over the network you can actually do as much as three hundred megabytes per second under ideal conditions so if you like me we're thinking initially when you saw this well Thunderbolt 340 gigabit per second like is that kind of an overkill interface for this the answer is actually not as much as you might think so we're still about fifteen hours left in order to copy about four terabytes of data and I believe it typically quotes this in terms of coffee time there's also a verification process that it has to go through that takes almost as long as the initial copy so to be clear it's not like you're gonna be editing video off something like this or anything like that like if you have to grab one file that's on one end of the tape and then one file that's on the other one the whole thing has to spool through like it's crazy slow but while there is still a purpose to having quick access to a lot of our footage so it's not like the vault is going anywhere so over thunderbolt with a ten gigabit network connection we can easily back up an entire tape over the course of a day and the costs compared to hard drives in store inators start to make a lot of sense once you get over about the 100 to 200 terabyte range add to that that these things are rated at a 30 year shelf-life compare that to hard drives whose lubrication will kind of wear out and it seep away causing them to die over time and tape might just be the way forward for us Optimas NuForce be free 5 is a true wireless earbuds that doesn't use a single cord they've got 5.6 millimeter graphene drivers for a hundred quality and ergonomic design for a comfortable and secure fit and it comes with a carrying case that doubles as a charger providing an extra four full charges when you're on the go we've got a 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