Re: LTO support

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 08/12, Pouya Tafti wrote:
> I'm looking for a low cost offsite backup solution for my teeny local NAS (couple of TiB of redundant ZFS RAIDZ2 on /amd64 9.2_STABLE) for disaster recovery.  Seemingly affordable LTO-5 drives (~EUR 250; sans libraries) pop up on eBay from time to time, and I thought I might start mailing tape backups to friends and family.  Being rather clueless about tape, I was wondering:

I'm not trying to discourage you from using tapes, but I thought I'd
mention Tarsnap, in case you haven't heard of it, an alternative to
tapes for off-site backups:

  https://www.tarsnap.com/

The Tarsnap servers reside in the USA, so depending on where the
computer is from which you would be backing up your data, maybe Internet
speed would be a problem; don't know.

The cost is 0.25 USD/GB-month for storage, and 0.25 USD/GB for
bandwidth.  For a couple TB of data, that would be expensive, but it's
actually the cost for the encoded data which is after deduplication,
compression, and encryption.  There's an `If Tarsnap costs $0.25 / GB
of storage, how is it possible to store "archives adding up to several
terabytes" while paying less than $10/month?' question in the FAQ for
that:

  https://www.tarsnap.com/faq.html#dedupe

In order to figure out how much it would actually cost for your data,
you'd need a way to figure out the size of the encoded data that would
be transmitted and stored.  The Tarsnap client has such a feature as
described in the `Since the cost depends on "encoded bytes", how can I
predict how much Tarsnap will cost before signing up?' question in the
FAQ:

  https://www.tarsnap.com/faq.html#cost-before-signup

You gave a budget of 250 EUR, so it might be worth seeing whether
Tarsnap would be comparable in price.

Lewis