Hiring an LTO7 external drive?

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jmorgannz

23 posts

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#295710 17-Apr-2022 11:45

Hey all,

Had a 6TB disk in my NAS go belly up tonight.
It's only using mirroring, so I'm in the danger zone till I replace it.

I got no probs going out and grabbing a replacement when stores open again - however I feel like I don't want to just sub in a new drive without first backing up what's on the still operational one - paranoid that the rebuild *somehow* dies and I lose the other drive. Rather play safe than sorry.

Problem is, I don't have a spare 6TB.
If I was working, I'd pony up and put together a more expensive solution with a more robust setup - more redundancy and cold drives ready to swap in, as well as an independent backup solution.
However; I am not working for health reasons so have to do things on a budget.

Seems to me the most economical way to do a backup would be to dump it all to an LTO7 tape.
Wondering if anyone knows places which would short term hire an LTO7 drive for a weekend or whatever.

TBH it's something I'd be keen to do once every few months anyway - would be nice to have another layer of cold backup, as treating RAID as a backup solution is stupid.

I'm in the 09

Dynamic

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#2903699 19-Apr-2022 10:23

I believe LTO-7 drives are in the $10-$15,000 price range and I expect demand for renting these would be rare. I would be astonished if you can find one available for rent in NZ. If you could, I'd expect the rental price to be around 10% of the drive's value or more to make it worthwhile for the hire company.

It may be more cost-effective to buy a massive drive to keep off site 99% of the time (or even better, two so one is ALWAYS off site) and copy across to them occasionally.

If you get stuck, I can lend you a 16Tb drive that is between projects and won't be needed until the end of the month. West Auckland pickup location.

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jmorgannz

23 posts

Geek

#2903805 19-Apr-2022 13:32

Hey bud,

Wow thanks for the offer.

I managed to divide the said 6TB into 4TB of important data, 2TB of losable data - then backed up the 4TB.

New drive in now, rebuilt OK. So don't need the offered drive.

I do have an LTO4 drive here - but backing up 6TB 800GB at a time sounds painful.

What are your thoughts on periodically intentionally removing a healthy disk from a RAID Mirror array to store offsite, and replacing with a new disk - then rotating every backup period?

So kind of hot-swap backup generation.

Not really what RAID is meant for - I imagine it has risks.

Andib

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#2903815 19-Apr-2022 13:50

jmorgannz:

What are your thoughts on periodically intentionally removing a healthy disk from a RAID Mirror array to store offsite, and replacing with a new disk - then rotating every backup period?

So kind of hot-swap backup generation.

Not really what RAID is meant for - I imagine it has risks.

Considering you'd need a big enough disk to mirror your exiting disk with RAID 1, You'd be better off using a free tool like Veeam (or any of the alternatives) to clone the drive. That way you don't have to deal with something that isn't supported by RAID and risk data loss

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jmorgannz

23 posts

Geek

#2903819 19-Apr-2022 13:53

Yeah,

TBH I wish I'd gone with a JBOD setup on TrueNAS or one of the other DIY NAS setups.

At the time I thought I wanted something plug and pray - but it's not worth it dealing with companies proprietary setups if anything goes bad.

mentalinc

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#2903892 19-Apr-2022 14:31

rebuilds are tough on the drives, I wouldn't force a rebuild moving a single (and useless by itself drive) off site.

Look into something like Veeam for sure to backup the data, or just grab a USB external drive and backup (copy rclone etc) to the drive and store offsite.

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jmorgannz

23 posts

Geek

#2903893 19-Apr-2022 14:33

Yeah a spare drive would be good. But I can't really justify another 10TB of drive right now given I'm not working.

Most of my data is static. I should stop being lazy and setup my LTO4 and just backup 800GB chunks of static stuff for cold storage.

Dynamic

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#2903921 19-Apr-2022 15:09

You've likely got more important and less important data, so consider a backup hierarchy and do the most important stuff regularly. Ideally automate this but do a manual check on a regular basis.

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MattR

224 posts

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#2916754 21-May-2022 12:04

Somebody like PlanB might have a drive to rent, don't expect it to be cheap.

I'd say you're better off buying a large capacity external drive and copying everything to that instead of tape - it'll be cheaper than a couple of days of LTO7 rental.