Okay, so obviously our devious plan
to back up our entire petabyte server
to Google Drive's cheap unlimited tier
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 150 terabytes of storage
when they start throttling you,
like literally throttling you.
So fine then, it's okay,
because we had a backup plan anyway.
Why store your data in the cloud
when you can store it on tapes?
So take off all your clothes.
This is the MagStore TRB3-HL8,
a Thunderbolt 3 equipped tape reader
that even in 2018 costs about 10 times more
than your mom or dad's hi-fi did back in the 1980s.
Yes, my friends, this puppy will run you about $6,000
for the single deck version
or $9,000 for the single deck version.
$9,000 for a dually.
So how on earth does that make any sense?
Let's start this story by backing up a little bit.
Ah, I get it.
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, yes, optical media, remember that?
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, check it out,
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,
minus 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 in 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 spite of the booster shots
that optical disks have gotten along the way,
like rewritable capabilities,
the capacity upgrades that DVD and Blu-ray brought,
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 supercomputers,
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 LTO8, 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, LTO8,
that we are compatible with either these LTO8 tapes
or LTO7.
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.
All right, 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 gotta make some changes in the BIOS.
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 .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.
Sound delightfully retro.
That was so cool.
Listen to it go.
So it 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 un-reeling tape
whenever you use the thing.
So this is a piece of software called MyLTO.
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, need it,
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 wanna 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 gonna 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 to breaks in files,
you're gonna hear it kind of rev down,
but in general, we're able to do anywhere
from about 150 to 200 and small change megabytes per second.
And that's over the network.
You can actually do as much as 300 megabytes per second
under ideal conditions.
So if you like me were thinking initially when you saw this,
well, Thunderbolt 3, 40 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 there's still about 15 hours left
in order to copy about four terabytes of data.
And I believe it typically quotes this
in terms of copy 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 10 gigabit network,
we can easily back up an entire tape
over the course of a day.
And the costs compared to hard drives in Storinators
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 seep away,
causing them to die over time.
And tape might just be the way forward for us.
So thanks for watching guys.
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