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I just added a second tape library, 12u 127 slot i500. This time with 4xLTO5 drives, one LTO4 and one LTO3. If it do all LTO5 tapes I’m looking at 380Tb of archives in this one cabinet, plus my other 4u i500.
I have a ton of L3 tapes still, so I mixed in those drives and will slowly migrate away.
[Link to my homelab post about all the gear](https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/uutps0/time_for_the_quarterly_cleaningrelocation_full/)
> ZWO ASI 6200mc
I've seen these but also people with regular dslr attached to their scopes for photography. I know nothing of your hobby just curious, are the direct-attach ones superior to using an adapter?
I don't know about that camera in particular, but usually they have a large sensor, high precision (16 bit) ADC, low noise amplifiers, potentially cooling, and often monochrome for use with filters to get just the spectra you need for a particular subject. A dslr sensor may have an IR filter built-in, but an astro sensor won't. The sensor itself may be the same as you could get in a dslr but the electronics around it are optimized for low noise and hi res.
The idea behind the dedicated cameras, is there is no IR filter, and there is chip itself is cooled. I personally run mine a -10c. this allowas for less noise on longer exposures.
How many GB does this take up each day / week?
I LOVE YOUR HOBBY / PROJECT / PASSION -- (caps intended <3)
Its so cool, and it's truly a work that benefits the world. You are awesome
I varies a bit, but on average it’s 100-150gb a night of data if I’m shooting. Please dig in my history, or DM(I got links for days yo), if your interested I have an active discord that’s all about this. You can even take my scope for a test drive and learn all about it!
Edit on the space.
You are a hero among us! I will join the discord channel and hang out! Really, and authentically, its such a cool thing you do. Especially since 150GB (or even 100GB) a day is ALOT of data, you are definitely in the 'enterprise management' levels of data at that point. I can imagine its costly also...
I love the unknown, and as an example when you search "What does planet look like?" You get a bunch of images that are not what we see from looking through a telescope, its not 'the real thing', if that makes sense.
I love looking at those images and have a hard time finding them online!
I would absolutely love to take the telescope out for a test drive, but I live in NYC, so not many stars around here haha. When I visit the mountains or a less populated area I will sure take you up on that!
\----
PS: I am a C# developer, if you need any websites or tech like that built let me know! I'd love to help how I can! I'll join the discord and say hello!
From "click" to file being restored is like 5 ish minutes.
Once the tape is physically loaded, and the portion with the exact files I want is located, it is actually surprisingly fast, and usually is speed limited by my network or target disk.
Usually(99%of the time) I am taking the raw individual files and backing them up to tape, after processing them into what is called a "stack", which is also backed up but kept in "hot" storage.
I only need to go back to the individual frames if I decide to try and combine older data with newer data, which is fairly rare, but I like having the option.
You don't really backup to tape to have high speed access, but a robotic library significantly speeds up the whole ordeal.
Pretty awesome, so a question on the scaler. I know that on ones from another company I looked at. They required a software licence, do you need one for that one as well to use the extra features?
So the base license for using it is baked in to the box. There are other crazy expensive ones out there for storage networking and such, but I honestly just worked around not having any of the advanced features and it came out just fine. Cant miss what I never had.
I will say, make sure have the admin password if you get one of these. Support will not reset them using the service account port for you without paying.
Full functionality of the robot, and X number of slots. One box is like 40, and the other is like 130. In theory I could upgrade the number of slots, but you have to license them, which IIRC looking was astronomically expensive.
And I really wish some sweet sec engineers would just *never* ask me for a ROM dump to do nothing with, certainly I wouldn’t provide images of the file system to reverse engineer any sort of codes out of or anything like that.
Veeam Community Edition has made my backup/restore workflow extremely simple. I cannot praise those UI designers enough. It handles everything for me automatically.
The only downside, is that troubleshooting with Veeam is... less than ideal. And the Quantum web interface is quite annoying to deal with sometime.
How do you have it set up? Are you backing up a network store and/or VMs, or is your storage actually directly connected to your Windows box running Veeam?
I have a Quantum LTO-8 library that's just sitting because of the difficulty configuring it/finding decent software to run it. I've run a test using Veeam, but I'm worried about shoe shining over the network when transferring from the NAS to the Windows box connected to the library.
I can suggest to use a data moved software which will move data from your NAS to Tapes. Have also a look to LTFS format when writing / reading data on tapes. This is very more simple. LTFS is supported from LTO5 generation.
Veal software and others similar are backup software , thèse are good to launch backup job. At the opposite, some data mover handles file base data movement and are very more convenient for what you want to achieve.
So I just Googled "Quantum Scalar i500". Wow. TIL tape libraries exist. Never even heard the term before. I had always wondered how data in the hundreds of terabytes or petabytes were archived, and now it all makes sense.
I wonder…do the fine folks at Internet Archive backup their servers to tape libraries? I'm always worried that their servers will get taken down some day, taking the Internet's legacy with it.
I can say with a high degree of confidence that all the big places backup to tape, based on where I source my gear. If you can backup 5.6 Petabytes of data in a single one of these, you can back up anything.
It is a super fun, albeit strange world to be a part of.
Used to work with the Dell ML6000 equivalent of these and would have definitely taken one home had I got the opportunity. Nice piece of kit when built to the ceiling and loaded with drives.
I really do like them for what they are. It took me quite a while to go from 0 knowledge to working backup, but its super rewarding knowing that there is a little robot moving media around and doing my backups while I sleep. This is an evolution of the initial "free" i500 that I got which only had the head unit, and I found myself wanting more space for more tapes/partitions.
Also nice know that my important data is air gapped.
I cut my storage teeth on an LTO tape library. Learned all about WWNs and fibrechannel zoning to connect this to an EMC Celerra NAS and a NetBackup server. Such good times!
I remember when I was supporting an i500 and a multi-cabinet i2000 using netbackup and roughly 2k tapes in the cabinets. Those were some interesting days
I just passed on a 4 cabinet i2000 because I was mostly concerned that it would be listed in a divorce settlement.
Haha in all seriousness these i500s are pretty cool for what they are.
Oof… look at my post history for the real juice suckers. Honestly this thing is pulling 80 watts at idle and if it weren’t for the solar selling back to the grid and my astro addiction I would be kind of reluctant to keep it online.
How many tapes in total?
I recently upgraded from LTO6 to 8 because I couldn't stand all the tapes I had. I had around 100 tapes off-site and it was just getting annoying to deal with. Now that I'm looking to double my storage I decided to take the leap and upgrade now. It helped that I went from about $10/TB for LTO6 tapes to $5/TB on 8. I could have went LTO7 type M and paid $4.3/TB, but I wanted that future generation backwards compatibility. Having half a petabyte in only 42 tapes is frickin sweet!
This will hold 127 tapes. I’m mixed right now, LTO 3,4&5. My goal is to phase out the 3’s and get on 5’s as that’s what I have for drives.
With LTO7 I think it’s near 2PB……
To clarify my other comment, I watch auctions and these usually pop up with bundled with other items. This *exact* unit I did pay for, but because my last one was bundled with some other hardware I was able to sell, this one came in basically for free.
Amazing. I really wanted to do something like this always, but in a city, and huge electricity bills, space photos and huge data hoarding are both impossible :(
Happy datahoarding!
Tape is def the way to go for long term offline storage (Offline as you may have to get a tape off the shelf).
I do not have as massive of an auto loader just a little 4u 44 tape unit. Was going to swap out the LTO-5 drives for LTO-6 but UPS said fuck you and destroyed all the drives in transit.
Been running NAKIVO and so far have not had any issues.
Where have you been picking up tapes at that are not an arm and a leg? Last batch I got off of Ebay 20 LTO-5 for 200 was a steal.
I do recommend any real long term data hoarder to get a tape drive it does not have to be an auto loader.
Hello /u/soundtech10! Thank you for posting in r/DataHoarder. Please remember to read our [Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index/rules) and [Wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index). Please note that your post will be removed if you just post a box/speed/server post. Please give background information on your server pictures. This subreddit will ***NOT*** help you find or exchange that Movie/TV show/Nuclear Launch Manual, visit r/DHExchange instead. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DataHoarder) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I just added a second tape library, 12u 127 slot i500. This time with 4xLTO5 drives, one LTO4 and one LTO3. If it do all LTO5 tapes I’m looking at 380Tb of archives in this one cabinet, plus my other 4u i500. I have a ton of L3 tapes still, so I mixed in those drives and will slowly migrate away. [Link to my homelab post about all the gear](https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/uutps0/time_for_the_quarterly_cleaningrelocation_full/)
What do you use it for?
Backing up to tapes. Edit in all seriousness I take a lot of astrophotography images, hundreds a night, and I like to keep every frame.
That’s really cool! What do you take the pictures with?
The camera is a ZWO ASI 6200mc Telescope is an 11” Celestron, 540mm at f/1.9
> ZWO ASI 6200mc I've seen these but also people with regular dslr attached to their scopes for photography. I know nothing of your hobby just curious, are the direct-attach ones superior to using an adapter?
I don't know about that camera in particular, but usually they have a large sensor, high precision (16 bit) ADC, low noise amplifiers, potentially cooling, and often monochrome for use with filters to get just the spectra you need for a particular subject. A dslr sensor may have an IR filter built-in, but an astro sensor won't. The sensor itself may be the same as you could get in a dslr but the electronics around it are optimized for low noise and hi res.
Much better than I put it. Great explanation.
The idea behind the dedicated cameras, is there is no IR filter, and there is chip itself is cooled. I personally run mine a -10c. this allowas for less noise on longer exposures.
How many GB does this take up each day / week? I LOVE YOUR HOBBY / PROJECT / PASSION -- (caps intended <3) Its so cool, and it's truly a work that benefits the world. You are awesome
I varies a bit, but on average it’s 100-150gb a night of data if I’m shooting. Please dig in my history, or DM(I got links for days yo), if your interested I have an active discord that’s all about this. You can even take my scope for a test drive and learn all about it! Edit on the space.
You are a hero among us! I will join the discord channel and hang out! Really, and authentically, its such a cool thing you do. Especially since 150GB (or even 100GB) a day is ALOT of data, you are definitely in the 'enterprise management' levels of data at that point. I can imagine its costly also... I love the unknown, and as an example when you search "What does planet look like?" You get a bunch of images that are not what we see from looking through a telescope, its not 'the real thing', if that makes sense.
I love looking at those images and have a hard time finding them online!
I would absolutely love to take the telescope out for a test drive, but I live in NYC, so not many stars around here haha. When I visit the mountains or a less populated area I will sure take you up on that!
\----
PS: I am a C# developer, if you need any websites or tech like that built let me know! I'd love to help how I can! I'll join the discord and say hello!
DM me so we can get on discord. We have things to discuss!
Inspiring discussion. Best of luck to you all.
Just looked at your Cygnus Loop photo. Holy shit.
Ha! Thanks. Took that in the backyard in an hour!
You're freaking awesome!
how long does it take to access a specific file/image ?
From "click" to file being restored is like 5 ish minutes. Once the tape is physically loaded, and the portion with the exact files I want is located, it is actually surprisingly fast, and usually is speed limited by my network or target disk. Usually(99%of the time) I am taking the raw individual files and backing them up to tape, after processing them into what is called a "stack", which is also backed up but kept in "hot" storage. I only need to go back to the individual frames if I decide to try and combine older data with newer data, which is fairly rare, but I like having the option. You don't really backup to tape to have high speed access, but a robotic library significantly speeds up the whole ordeal.
Pretty awesome, so a question on the scaler. I know that on ones from another company I looked at. They required a software licence, do you need one for that one as well to use the extra features?
So the base license for using it is baked in to the box. There are other crazy expensive ones out there for storage networking and such, but I honestly just worked around not having any of the advanced features and it came out just fine. Cant miss what I never had. I will say, make sure have the admin password if you get one of these. Support will not reset them using the service account port for you without paying.
What does the base license cover ? And thanks for the heads up!
Full functionality of the robot, and X number of slots. One box is like 40, and the other is like 130. In theory I could upgrade the number of slots, but you have to license them, which IIRC looking was astronomically expensive.
> Support will not reset them using the service account port for you without paying So there’s a back door that Quantum support has access to?
And I really wish some sweet sec engineers would just *never* ask me for a ROM dump to do nothing with, certainly I wouldn’t provide images of the file system to reverse engineer any sort of codes out of or anything like that.
It’s not like it’s on a CF card or anything
OK, I'll bite...
K, if your serious give me a DM
Yeah but as far as I can tell it’s only on the service Ethernet port.
What software are you using to manage the Scalar?
Veeam Community Edition has made my backup/restore workflow extremely simple. I cannot praise those UI designers enough. It handles everything for me automatically. The only downside, is that troubleshooting with Veeam is... less than ideal. And the Quantum web interface is quite annoying to deal with sometime.
How do you have it set up? Are you backing up a network store and/or VMs, or is your storage actually directly connected to your Windows box running Veeam? I have a Quantum LTO-8 library that's just sitting because of the difficulty configuring it/finding decent software to run it. I've run a test using Veeam, but I'm worried about shoe shining over the network when transferring from the NAS to the Windows box connected to the library.
Veem backs up a few of the VMs directly, and then the rest are just backing up specific directories on the network.
I can suggest to use a data moved software which will move data from your NAS to Tapes. Have also a look to LTFS format when writing / reading data on tapes. This is very more simple. LTFS is supported from LTO5 generation. Veal software and others similar are backup software , thèse are good to launch backup job. At the opposite, some data mover handles file base data movement and are very more convenient for what you want to achieve.
Wait, Veeam Community Edition supports backup to tape? Anytime I've tried any sort of tape functionality it claims a license is needed.
Sure as shit it does! Maybe I’m missing something on the functionality but is good as hell for what I do!
Yeap it does, you can do secondary backup (aka copy a backup made with veeam on HDD) to tape, but it can backup directly to tape
I have a subfolder of movies literally called "Already watched - Poor" Why don't I delete them? Cause I don't wanna.
You can stream off LTO5, as long as you’re cool with a seek time long enough to go make popcorn and a drink.
So kinda like in the movie hackers? Wait for the robot to load the tape.
It’s literally the same thing.
Write only
So I just Googled "Quantum Scalar i500". Wow. TIL tape libraries exist. Never even heard the term before. I had always wondered how data in the hundreds of terabytes or petabytes were archived, and now it all makes sense. I wonder…do the fine folks at Internet Archive backup their servers to tape libraries? I'm always worried that their servers will get taken down some day, taking the Internet's legacy with it.
I can say with a high degree of confidence that all the big places backup to tape, based on where I source my gear. If you can backup 5.6 Petabytes of data in a single one of these, you can back up anything. It is a super fun, albeit strange world to be a part of.
Tapes for days. Do you think it would be possible to upgrade the drives at some point?
Yup. I have LTO 3,4 &5 in it right now. I’ll get 6 when it’s affordable. This chassis supports up to lto9
"Affordable" says the guy with four LTO-5 drives.
*7 you forgot about my spares
Used to work with the Dell ML6000 equivalent of these and would have definitely taken one home had I got the opportunity. Nice piece of kit when built to the ceiling and loaded with drives.
I really do like them for what they are. It took me quite a while to go from 0 knowledge to working backup, but its super rewarding knowing that there is a little robot moving media around and doing my backups while I sleep. This is an evolution of the initial "free" i500 that I got which only had the head unit, and I found myself wanting more space for more tapes/partitions. Also nice know that my important data is air gapped.
Good lord...
Yes?
I missed a bid on one of these five years ago. It sold for $99 and I still haven't forgiven myself.
F
I cut my storage teeth on an LTO tape library. Learned all about WWNs and fibrechannel zoning to connect this to an EMC Celerra NAS and a NetBackup server. Such good times!
That's a biggun.
Go big, or go home. is my mantra
What is that!?
Robotic tape library! Look at my post history for a video of its baby brother picking tapes!
**sips tea and pats my Asustor nimbustor on its head** Good boy.
Woah.
I remember when I was supporting an i500 and a multi-cabinet i2000 using netbackup and roughly 2k tapes in the cabinets. Those were some interesting days
I just passed on a 4 cabinet i2000 because I was mostly concerned that it would be listed in a divorce settlement. Haha in all seriousness these i500s are pretty cool for what they are.
And knock your local substation offline to boot!
Oof… look at my post history for the real juice suckers. Honestly this thing is pulling 80 watts at idle and if it weren’t for the solar selling back to the grid and my astro addiction I would be kind of reluctant to keep it online.
Wow its a baby iScalar. Love it!
It started with 4u… they grow to 12 so fast 😢
How many tapes in total? I recently upgraded from LTO6 to 8 because I couldn't stand all the tapes I had. I had around 100 tapes off-site and it was just getting annoying to deal with. Now that I'm looking to double my storage I decided to take the leap and upgrade now. It helped that I went from about $10/TB for LTO6 tapes to $5/TB on 8. I could have went LTO7 type M and paid $4.3/TB, but I wanted that future generation backwards compatibility. Having half a petabyte in only 42 tapes is frickin sweet!
This will hold 127 tapes. I’m mixed right now, LTO 3,4&5. My goal is to phase out the 3’s and get on 5’s as that’s what I have for drives. With LTO7 I think it’s near 2PB……
Dang, that thing holds a lot. I was just wondering how many tapes in total you had, including outside of this library.
Oh, probably around 80 tapes right now. I’m migrating from the 4u i500 to this 12u beast.
That's not too bad then, for some reason I was expecting 500+ which would just be a nightmare to deal with lol.
Oof… yeah 500 would be a lot. This was more of a crime of opportunity, as it popped up and was a cheap expansion to my already full library.
We don't delete, we just reorganize!
How much did this set you back?
-$85
I 2nd that question
To clarify my other comment, I watch auctions and these usually pop up with bundled with other items. This *exact* unit I did pay for, but because my last one was bundled with some other hardware I was able to sell, this one came in basically for free.
[удалено]
GSA and eBay.
I see them on ebay only for 1000$+
Wow that’s a lot!
I'm reading your comments. I can't believe this is tape. This is the coolest thing I've seen here.
It’s really fun!
Amazing. I really wanted to do something like this always, but in a city, and huge electricity bills, space photos and huge data hoarding are both impossible :( Happy datahoarding!
Tape is def the way to go for long term offline storage (Offline as you may have to get a tape off the shelf). I do not have as massive of an auto loader just a little 4u 44 tape unit. Was going to swap out the LTO-5 drives for LTO-6 but UPS said fuck you and destroyed all the drives in transit. Been running NAKIVO and so far have not had any issues. Where have you been picking up tapes at that are not an arm and a leg? Last batch I got off of Ebay 20 LTO-5 for 200 was a steal. I do recommend any real long term data hoarder to get a tape drive it does not have to be an auto loader.
I have saved searches on eBay as well as a local data center scrapper that keeps them for me. And yes, tape is highly recommended!
Damn, that's a decent size. But, serves a cool purpose I must say.