> Tapes are fun. You can fit a petabyte of data in a bankers box!
Yes, though those ultra-thin M.2 NVMe drives could probably top that now.
> Do we have a drive that can read this tape?
Don't let this be a problem in the first place: buy 4 tape drives and keep 2 of them in your cold/offsite/airgapped storage site (2 in case 1 fails, so you can use the remaining drive to transfer everything to a newer format).
> Do we have server we can connect it to?
Significant hardware should not (and is not) necessary: the LTO-7/8/9 drives I see for sale right now seem to be using either USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or SAS connections; USB and Thunderbolt can be handled by any computer you can find at a PC recycler today; while any old desktop can handle SAS with a $80 HBA card.
> Do we have storage we can extract it to? (go ask your internal IT team for 10TB of drivespace...)
10TB isn't a good example (case-in-point: I have a 3-year-old stack of unused 12TB WD drives less than 3 feet away from me).
That said, if you're enterprise-y enough for a $4000 LTO-9 drive, then you probably also have a SAN that's chock full of drives, so being able to provision a 10TB+ LUN should be implicit.
> What program did we create this tape with? Backup Exec, Veritas, ArcServe, SureStore
Ideally, none of those; instead, good ol' Perl and `dd`.
> You have the encryption keys, right?
I don't encrypt my backups to avoid this problem. My old data archives have little exploitable value for any potential attacker; and I imagine I'd store backup tapes this important in a fireproof safe in my parents' house or something. I'd only encrypt the entire tape if the tape were to leave my custody.
I appreciate that this is not for everyone, and it's probably illegal for some people/orgs to not encrypt backups too anyway (HIPAA, etc).
> How much of this data already exists on the previous months backup?
Incremental/Differential backups are still a thing.
> Who's going to pay for the storage to move it to Glacier/etc?
No-one should. Cold data backups should/must always be in the custody of a designated responsible officer of the company.
BUUUT, I guess there's nothing wrong with storing an encrypted copy in Cloud storage (as in S3/Glacier/AzureBlobs - not OneDrive...). I actually do this right now thanks to the smooth and painless integration in my Synology NAS. It costs me about $15/mo to store all these TBs in S3.
> How long is it going to take to upload?
Consider that it's 2024 - a company with LTO-9 and SAN is probably going to have a metro-ethernet IP connection at 10Gbps or even faster. At home I have a 10Gbps symmetric connection from Ziply (it's $300/mo and they give you an SFP module, which I put into my Ubiquiti UDM): so the limiting factor here is not my upload speed, but my drive read speed (LTO-9 drives seem to read at about 2-3Gbps raw/uncompressed?)
Yes, though those ultra-thin M.2 NVMe drives could probably top that now.
> Do we have a drive that can read this tape?
Don't let this be a problem in the first place: buy 4 tape drives and keep 2 of them in your cold/offsite/airgapped storage site (2 in case 1 fails, so you can use the remaining drive to transfer everything to a newer format).
> Do we have server we can connect it to?
Significant hardware should not (and is not) necessary: the LTO-7/8/9 drives I see for sale right now seem to be using either USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or SAS connections; USB and Thunderbolt can be handled by any computer you can find at a PC recycler today; while any old desktop can handle SAS with a $80 HBA card.
> Do we have storage we can extract it to? (go ask your internal IT team for 10TB of drivespace...)
10TB isn't a good example (case-in-point: I have a 3-year-old stack of unused 12TB WD drives less than 3 feet away from me).
That said, if you're enterprise-y enough for a $4000 LTO-9 drive, then you probably also have a SAN that's chock full of drives, so being able to provision a 10TB+ LUN should be implicit.
> What program did we create this tape with? Backup Exec, Veritas, ArcServe, SureStore
Ideally, none of those; instead, good ol' Perl and `dd`.
> You have the encryption keys, right?
I don't encrypt my backups to avoid this problem. My old data archives have little exploitable value for any potential attacker; and I imagine I'd store backup tapes this important in a fireproof safe in my parents' house or something. I'd only encrypt the entire tape if the tape were to leave my custody.
I appreciate that this is not for everyone, and it's probably illegal for some people/orgs to not encrypt backups too anyway (HIPAA, etc).
> How much of this data already exists on the previous months backup?
Incremental/Differential backups are still a thing.
> Who's going to pay for the storage to move it to Glacier/etc?
No-one should. Cold data backups should/must always be in the custody of a designated responsible officer of the company.
BUUUT, I guess there's nothing wrong with storing an encrypted copy in Cloud storage (as in S3/Glacier/AzureBlobs - not OneDrive...). I actually do this right now thanks to the smooth and painless integration in my Synology NAS. It costs me about $15/mo to store all these TBs in S3.
> How long is it going to take to upload?
Consider that it's 2024 - a company with LTO-9 and SAN is probably going to have a metro-ethernet IP connection at 10Gbps or even faster. At home I have a 10Gbps symmetric connection from Ziply (it's $300/mo and they give you an SFP module, which I put into my Ubiquiti UDM): so the limiting factor here is not my upload speed, but my drive read speed (LTO-9 drives seem to read at about 2-3Gbps raw/uncompressed?)