Cold Storage Options in 2019

[Samir]

So we don't have much data, but it's enough that we care about it.

We have had pretty much an online method for backup and redundancy--off site backups synced in near-time over a vpn tunnel and usb drive backups otherwise.

I've not thought about cold storage in quite some time, but now that some of our data isn't accessed much and is more apt for archive, the thought has occurred to me to simply place copies in safety deposit boxes--except the fact that I've had problems with hard drives not being usable after being in cold storage.

Tape has historically always been goto for cold storage, but it is not feasible to implement for us since the data set is so small. Optical is too small, although large BD might be manageable. Still, BE and DVD seems to suffer from media failure faster than CD-R, even with quality media like mam-a.

What do you use and why? How does the cost work out for you?

 

[T_Minus]

M-DISC Blu-Ray

I don't have much old data luckily

 

[Samir]

M-DISC Blu-Ray

I don't have much old data luckily

I've considered that medium, but with optical going away I think finding a working drive to read the discs would be the issue. I still have an older 4.6GB MO drive I have to get data off of and the drive is more of an issue than the media.

 

[Rand__]

Why not get an old gen tape drive for cheap and a spare unit to be safe?

Tape usually has the issue of too much data and too slow speeds, so you would be in a comfy situation

 

[Samir]

Why not get an old gen tape drive for cheap and a spare unit to be safe?

Tape usually has the issue of too much data and too slow speeds, so you would be in a comfy situation

Hmmm...that's not something I had considered. What would an 'old gen' tape drive be and how would a backup be made? I remember from back in the day that tape drives needed some sort of back up software and weren't exactly as easy as just copying files to a second hard drive.

 

[Rand__]

Well that depends on the space requirements you have - the older the cheaper.

Linear Tape-Open - Wikipedia

LTO5 would cover 1.5TB per tape (uncompressed), but o/c multiple tapes are also an option.
And yes you will need tape software, paid or freeware, but there are many options, eg Veeam, Iperius, Bacula and a lot more;
which one to pick depends on budged and organizational requirements (eg a way to identify which tape has a certain file)

 

[Samir]

Awesome link! And I thought 8-track cartridge technology died back then.

LTO5 would be the sweet spot as almost nothing at this point exceeds that capacity. What type of interface do drives use? Is it still SCSI, or SAS now?

 

[Rand__]

I think with LTO5 most you get are SAS (native or converted to USB), but due to age you will be able to get most options relatively cheap.

 

[Samir]

Some quick searches on ebay got me all sorts of results.

Seems like I'd need to build a dedicated system just with this drive in it just for backups.

 

[Rand__]

well a dedicated vm with a passthrough hba would suffice i guess.
You also can run non dedicated but somewhere you want the software to be installed. Also a larger disk so you can disk2disk2tape to have proper tape data rates and reduce load on the tape.

 

[gigatexal]

So we don't have much data, but it's enough that we care about it.

We have had pretty much an online method for backup and redundancy--off site backups synced in near-time over a vpn tunnel and usb drive backups otherwise.

I've not thought about cold storage in quite some time, but now that some of our data isn't accessed much and is more apt for archive, the thought has occurred to me to simply place copies in safety deposit boxes--except the fact that I've had problems with hard drives not being usable after being in cold storage.

Tape has historically always been goto for cold storage, but it is not feasible to implement for us since the data set is so small. Optical is too small, although large BD might be manageable. Still, BE and DVD seems to suffer from media failure faster than CD-R, even with quality media like mam-a.

What do you use and why? How does the cost work out for you?

S3 glacier is really cheap imo.

 

[NashBrydges]

S3 glacier is really cheap imo.

And Glacier has a tier that is even cheaper than the standard Glacier storage called Glacier Deep Archive.

 

[Samir]

well a dedicated vm with a passthrough hba would suffice i guess.
You also can run non dedicated but somewhere you want the software to be installed. Also a larger disk so you can disk2disk2tape to have proper tape data rates and reduce load on the tape.

Gotcha. Sounds like a dedicated machine would be best. I guess having a drive in there that is a mirror of the source drive would help too.

 

[Samir]

S3 glacier is really cheap imo.

And Glacier has a tier that is even cheaper than the standard Glacier storage called Glacier Deep Archive.

Interesting. I haven't looked at the s3 offerings in ages so this is pretty interesting to see.

Could a backup be as simple an an ipsec tunnel to the s3 volume and then some sort of s3 client?

 

[gigatexal]

Yup. We do something like that. An ssh container on the namespace in Kubernetes and then we just ssh to it and pipe the backup to it and then to s3