1 00:00:00,400 --> 00:00:05,000 Okay, so obviously our devious plan 2 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:07,200 to back up our entire petabyte server 3 00:00:07,200 --> 00:00:10,480 to Google Drive's cheap unlimited tier 4 00:00:10,480 --> 00:00:13,880 was going to hit a snag at some point. 5 00:00:13,880 --> 00:00:15,840 And from talking to Wendell over at Level One Text, 6 00:00:15,840 --> 00:00:19,680 that point seems to be at about 150 terabytes of storage 7 00:00:19,680 --> 00:00:21,600 when they start throttling you, 8 00:00:21,600 --> 00:00:22,840 like literally throttling you. 9 00:00:22,840 --> 00:00:25,000 So fine then, it's okay, 10 00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:28,720 because we had a backup plan anyway. 11 00:00:28,720 --> 00:00:30,640 Why store your data in the cloud 12 00:00:30,640 --> 00:00:43,950 when you can store it on tapes? 13 00:00:43,950 --> 00:00:50,920 So take off all your clothes. 14 00:00:50,920 --> 00:00:54,960 This is the MagStore TRB3-HL8, 15 00:00:54,960 --> 00:00:57,800 a Thunderbolt 3 equipped tape reader 16 00:00:57,800 --> 00:01:01,820 that even in 2018 costs about 10 times more 17 00:01:01,820 --> 00:01:05,240 than your mom or dad's hi-fi did back in the 1980s. 18 00:01:05,240 --> 00:01:10,240 Yes, my friends, this puppy will run you about $6,000 19 00:01:10,560 --> 00:01:12,200 for the single deck version 20 00:01:12,200 --> 00:01:12,940 or $9,000 for the single deck version. 21 00:01:12,960 --> 00:01:16,580 $9,000 for a dually. 22 00:01:16,580 --> 00:01:20,120 So how on earth does that make any sense? 23 00:01:20,120 --> 00:01:23,260 Let's start this story by backing up a little bit. 24 00:01:24,180 --> 00:01:25,580 Ah, I get it. 25 00:01:25,580 --> 00:01:27,540 So when I was growing up, 26 00:01:27,540 --> 00:01:32,260 the way to archive data long-term was using optical media. 27 00:01:32,260 --> 00:01:34,720 So the CD was high on its victory 28 00:01:34,720 --> 00:01:36,940 over the cassette in the music industry. 29 00:01:36,940 --> 00:01:39,180 I think I have a CD around here somewhere. 30 00:01:39,180 --> 00:01:43,700 Oh, yes, optical media, remember that? 31 00:01:44,660 --> 00:01:49,660 Anyway, CDs were slow and inconvenient to create, 32 00:01:49,980 --> 00:01:52,100 assuming that you could afford a CD burner at all, 33 00:01:52,100 --> 00:01:56,300 but their massive capacity meant that compared to floppy disks, 34 00:01:56,300 --> 00:02:00,340 oh, I have those too, check it out, 35 00:02:00,340 --> 00:02:03,460 compared to floppy disks and even zip disks, 36 00:02:03,460 --> 00:02:07,180 you could store what felt like an unlimited amount 37 00:02:07,180 --> 00:02:08,820 of at least certain types of files. 38 00:02:08,820 --> 00:02:12,320 Because remember that a 1.44 megabyte floppy, 39 00:02:12,320 --> 00:02:15,920 minus formatting overhead, could only store like a handful, 40 00:02:15,920 --> 00:02:19,080 of even basic things like homework assignments. 41 00:02:19,080 --> 00:02:20,920 Over time though, portable hard drives, 42 00:02:20,920 --> 00:02:22,480 which have come down in cost dramatically 43 00:02:22,480 --> 00:02:24,040 over the last decade or two, 44 00:02:24,040 --> 00:02:27,360 and cloud storage, which is undeniably more convenient 45 00:02:27,360 --> 00:02:29,180 for small backup jobs, 46 00:02:29,180 --> 00:02:32,800 have gradually displaced optical media. 47 00:02:32,800 --> 00:02:34,280 In spite of the booster shots 48 00:02:34,280 --> 00:02:36,220 that optical disks have gotten along the way, 49 00:02:36,220 --> 00:02:38,880 like rewritable capabilities, 50 00:02:38,880 --> 00:02:41,920 the capacity upgrades that DVD and Blu-ray brought, 51 00:02:41,920 --> 00:02:45,360 there's just a practical limit to how small you can make 52 00:02:45,360 --> 00:02:48,940 the little bumps on these plastic and foil Frisbees 53 00:02:48,940 --> 00:02:52,760 before the cost to make them just stops making sense. 54 00:02:52,760 --> 00:02:57,440 But that doesn't mean that the expensive drive, 55 00:02:57,440 --> 00:02:59,920 cheap media model is dead at all. 56 00:02:59,920 --> 00:03:03,960 In fact, all this time, quietly in the background, 57 00:03:03,960 --> 00:03:08,480 tape storage has been alive and well in the enterprise space 58 00:03:08,480 --> 00:03:10,660 with even modern supercomputers, 59 00:03:10,660 --> 00:03:14,180 like the SFU Cedar installation that we toured last year, 60 00:03:14,180 --> 00:03:15,060 being equipped with 61 00:03:15,360 --> 00:03:17,760 state-of-the-art tape libraries. 62 00:03:17,760 --> 00:03:20,300 This product is a little different though. 63 00:03:20,300 --> 00:03:22,340 So it's the same actual drive 64 00:03:22,340 --> 00:03:23,840 that you would find in a data center. 65 00:03:23,840 --> 00:03:26,000 They're actually all made by IBM these days 66 00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:27,140 and then rebadged. 67 00:03:27,140 --> 00:03:30,880 So it's LTO8, which means that each of your tapes 68 00:03:30,880 --> 00:03:34,980 is gonna have a total of 12 terabytes of storage. 69 00:03:34,980 --> 00:03:37,600 Now, there is this 30 terabytes on here, 70 00:03:37,600 --> 00:03:40,100 but that assumes that whatever data you're putting on it 71 00:03:40,100 --> 00:03:41,740 is highly compressible, 72 00:03:41,740 --> 00:03:44,060 so that would not apply to the kind of media 73 00:03:44,060 --> 00:03:45,320 that we would be backing up, in fact, 74 00:03:45,320 --> 00:03:46,420 for most things. 75 00:03:46,420 --> 00:03:47,380 Very few people use it. 76 00:03:47,380 --> 00:03:50,380 So 12 terabytes is really what you can count on. 77 00:03:50,380 --> 00:03:52,800 And then it also means, LTO8, 78 00:03:52,800 --> 00:03:56,340 that we are compatible with either these LTO8 tapes 79 00:03:56,340 --> 00:03:57,760 or LTO7. 80 00:03:57,760 --> 00:03:59,700 Normally, you would get two generations 81 00:03:59,700 --> 00:04:01,300 of backwards compatibility, 82 00:04:01,300 --> 00:04:04,200 but there was a materials change to barium ferrite 83 00:04:04,200 --> 00:04:07,910 that made that impractical this time around. 84 00:04:07,910 --> 00:04:12,760 All right, so why did they put all this work 85 00:04:12,760 --> 00:04:15,420 into creating a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, 86 00:04:15,580 --> 00:04:18,700 for a tape drive? 87 00:04:18,700 --> 00:04:21,560 Well, for people like me, 88 00:04:21,560 --> 00:04:25,430 who have hundreds of terabytes of data, 89 00:04:25,430 --> 00:04:29,470 but who don't necessarily need lightning-fast access to it. 90 00:04:29,470 --> 00:04:33,680 So what we're gonna do is give it a try. 91 00:04:33,680 --> 00:04:34,960 Now, when I first set this up, 92 00:04:34,960 --> 00:04:37,540 I actually did it on a Windows machine, 93 00:04:37,540 --> 00:04:41,620 but quite frankly, I wouldn't really recommend that. 94 00:04:41,620 --> 00:04:43,840 It's not a fantastic experience. 95 00:04:43,840 --> 00:04:46,440 There's this whole annoying rigmarole to get the drivers, 96 00:04:46,440 --> 00:04:49,360 installed, you have to disable driver signature enforcement, 97 00:04:49,360 --> 00:04:51,300 you gotta make some changes in the BIOS. 98 00:04:51,300 --> 00:04:55,340 It's a real hassle, but once you do get it working, 99 00:04:55,340 --> 00:04:57,620 assuming that you can find an app that cooperates, 100 00:04:57,620 --> 00:05:00,540 there are some driver issues on Windows as well, 101 00:05:00,540 --> 00:05:03,560 it is a lot more painless than it used to be. 102 00:05:03,560 --> 00:05:06,420 Now, in the old days with tape drives, 103 00:05:06,420 --> 00:05:08,180 you used to have to take all the files 104 00:05:08,180 --> 00:05:09,760 that you wanted to archive, 105 00:05:09,760 --> 00:05:12,680 wrap them up into another type of file 106 00:05:12,680 --> 00:05:15,820 called a .tar file or a tar ball. 107 00:05:15,820 --> 00:05:17,800 And then if you wanted to pull anything off of it, 108 00:05:17,800 --> 00:05:19,040 you had to pull the whole thing off 109 00:05:19,040 --> 00:05:22,060 and then you could pick out the one file that you needed. 110 00:05:22,060 --> 00:05:24,380 Now, it's basically drag and drop. 111 00:05:24,380 --> 00:05:28,390 So whether you're using Finder or Windows Explorer, 112 00:05:28,390 --> 00:05:31,090 it's a much more seamless experience. 113 00:05:31,090 --> 00:05:33,510 Let's go ahead and load this puppy in. 114 00:05:33,510 --> 00:05:39,110 Sound delightfully retro. 115 00:05:39,110 --> 00:05:40,350 That was so cool. 116 00:05:40,350 --> 00:05:44,040 Listen to it go. 117 00:05:44,040 --> 00:05:47,960 So it takes like 30 seconds or so to initialize, 118 00:05:47,960 --> 00:05:51,460 but we're just gonna enjoy those sounds together. 119 00:05:51,480 --> 00:05:59,620 So the thing about tape 120 00:05:59,620 --> 00:06:04,400 is that it has to be read from and written to linearly. 121 00:06:04,400 --> 00:06:07,480 There's no read-write head that can jump around on the media 122 00:06:07,480 --> 00:06:09,760 and obviously, unlike solid state storage, 123 00:06:09,760 --> 00:06:13,300 it can't just grab an address and pull the data directly. 124 00:06:13,300 --> 00:06:17,880 So you're gonna hear a lot of it reeling and un-reeling tape 125 00:06:17,880 --> 00:06:19,720 whenever you use the thing. 126 00:06:19,720 --> 00:06:22,400 So this is a piece of software called MyLTO. 127 00:06:22,400 --> 00:06:25,140 They have a more advanced version called Pre-Roll Post 128 00:06:25,140 --> 00:06:27,200 that has a bunch of database features, 129 00:06:27,200 --> 00:06:29,200 but basically what this is, 130 00:06:29,200 --> 00:06:31,740 you don't, strictly speaking, need it, 131 00:06:31,740 --> 00:06:33,460 but what it is is it's a piece of software 132 00:06:33,460 --> 00:06:36,740 for helping you keep all of your backups organized. 133 00:06:36,740 --> 00:06:38,780 So in the event that you wanna go back and pull 134 00:06:38,780 --> 00:06:41,680 like an old news story or something to refer back to it, 135 00:06:41,680 --> 00:06:44,320 you know exactly where to go, which labeled tape to pull, 136 00:06:44,320 --> 00:06:47,900 and where exactly in the folder structure you would find 137 00:06:47,900 --> 00:06:50,040 the files that you're looking for. 138 00:06:50,040 --> 00:06:51,320 It's gonna take a couple minutes here 139 00:06:51,320 --> 00:06:53,200 to figure out exactly how much data 140 00:06:53,200 --> 00:06:55,640 is in this folder on our NAS on the Vault. 141 00:06:55,640 --> 00:06:56,480 So this is pulling off a petabyte project. 142 00:06:56,480 --> 00:06:56,500 So this is pulling off a petabyte project. 143 00:06:56,500 --> 00:06:57,080 So this is pulling off a petabyte project. 144 00:06:57,080 --> 00:06:57,180 So this is pulling off a petabyte project. 145 00:06:57,180 --> 00:06:58,540 So this is pulling off a petabyte project. 146 00:06:58,540 --> 00:07:00,020 So that took about 20 minutes, 147 00:07:00,020 --> 00:07:02,720 but the bottleneck here is just our network connection 148 00:07:02,720 --> 00:07:03,560 to the Vault. 149 00:07:03,560 --> 00:07:19,060 So now we can go ahead and begin. 150 00:07:19,060 --> 00:07:21,240 So as you get to breaks in files, 151 00:07:21,240 --> 00:07:22,960 you're gonna hear it kind of rev down, 152 00:07:22,960 --> 00:07:25,660 but in general, we're able to do anywhere 153 00:07:25,660 --> 00:07:30,660 from about 150 to 200 and small change megabytes per second. 154 00:07:30,660 --> 00:07:32,780 from about 150 to 200 and small change megabytes per second. 155 00:07:32,780 --> 00:07:34,240 And that's over the network. 156 00:07:34,240 --> 00:07:37,400 You can actually do as much as 300 megabytes per second 157 00:07:37,400 --> 00:07:38,360 under ideal conditions. 158 00:07:38,360 --> 00:07:42,080 So if you like me were thinking initially when you saw this, 159 00:07:42,080 --> 00:07:44,820 well, Thunderbolt 3, 40 gigabit per second, 160 00:07:44,820 --> 00:07:47,280 like is that kind of an overkill interface for this? 161 00:07:47,280 --> 00:07:52,690 The answer is actually not as much as you might think. 162 00:07:52,690 --> 00:07:57,470 So there's still about 15 hours left 163 00:07:57,470 --> 00:08:01,070 in order to copy about four terabytes of data. 164 00:08:01,070 --> 00:08:03,870 And I believe it typically quotes this 165 00:08:03,870 --> 00:08:05,610 in terms of copy time. 166 00:08:05,610 --> 00:08:07,790 There's also a verification process 167 00:08:07,790 --> 00:08:08,630 that it has to go through 168 00:08:08,630 --> 00:08:10,890 that takes almost as long as the initial copy. 169 00:08:10,890 --> 00:08:13,180 So to be clear, 170 00:08:13,180 --> 00:08:16,520 it's not like you're gonna be editing video 171 00:08:16,520 --> 00:08:18,480 off something like this or anything like that. 172 00:08:18,480 --> 00:08:20,000 Like if you have to grab one file 173 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:21,480 that's on one end of the tape 174 00:08:21,480 --> 00:08:23,160 and then one file that's on the other one, 175 00:08:23,160 --> 00:08:25,100 the whole thing has to spool through. 176 00:08:25,100 --> 00:08:28,350 Like it's crazy slow. 177 00:08:28,350 --> 00:08:31,330 But while there is still a purpose 178 00:08:31,330 --> 00:08:33,930 to having quick access to a lot of our footage, 179 00:08:33,930 --> 00:08:36,010 so it's not like the vault is going anywhere. 180 00:08:36,010 --> 00:08:38,070 So over Thunderbolt with a 10 gigabit network, 181 00:08:38,070 --> 00:08:38,950 So over Thunderbolt with a 10 gigabit network, 182 00:08:38,950 --> 00:08:42,850 we can easily back up an entire tape 183 00:08:42,850 --> 00:08:44,610 over the course of a day. 184 00:08:44,610 --> 00:08:48,010 And the costs compared to hard drives in Storinators 185 00:08:48,010 --> 00:08:50,470 start to make a lot of sense 186 00:08:50,470 --> 00:08:55,470 once you get over about the 100 to 200 terabyte range. 187 00:08:55,890 --> 00:08:57,830 Add to that that these things are rated 188 00:08:57,830 --> 00:09:01,030 at a 30 year shelf life, 189 00:09:01,030 --> 00:09:03,290 compare that to hard drives whose lubrication 190 00:09:03,290 --> 00:09:06,810 will kind of wear out and seep away, 191 00:09:06,810 --> 00:09:08,950 causing them to die over time. 192 00:09:08,950 --> 00:09:13,850 And tape might just be the way forward for us. 193 00:09:13,850 --> 00:09:14,770 So thanks for watching guys. 194 00:09:14,770 --> 00:09:17,070 If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. 195 00:09:17,070 --> 00:09:20,540 But who couldn't like that sound? 196 00:09:20,540 --> 00:09:22,520 But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, 197 00:09:22,520 --> 00:09:23,660 or maybe consider checking out 198 00:09:23,660 --> 00:09:24,980 where to buy the stuff we featured 199 00:09:24,980 --> 00:09:26,640 at the link in the video description. 200 00:09:26,640 --> 00:09:27,920 Also down there is our merch store, 201 00:09:27,920 --> 00:09:29,220 which has cool shirts like this one 202 00:09:29,220 --> 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