The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/keybhoarder on 2024-12-23 10:21:21.

I have the infrastructure for this but I don’t have most of the business side in place so this does not constitute any formal offer yet. Just trying to gauge if there is some interest in a service that provides LTO backup services where you store the tapes yourself long term. This saves you the cost of a tape drive while still having the benefits of long term tape storage.

How it would work:

  • You encrypt and tar/compress your data on your side to 100 MB+ chunks.
  • You upload your encrypted tars/zips/whatever to one of our servers, or alternatively ship us a drive which we’ll ship back to you with the tape(s).
  • We copy the data to LTO8 tape for you.
  • We checksum the tapes on a second drive and email you the MD5’s for checking
  • After verification, we delete the local copy of your data and ship the tape(s) to you for long term storage.
  • To restore, send us back a tape and an empty drive or a link to a server online where we can copy the data to (provided that server has 1GBit or better connectivity, preferably 10Gbit).
  • The tapes will be in standard LTFS format. You can rent any compatible LTO8 drive to restore it, you don’t need to go through us.
  • We’re located in the US (WA state)

The cost structure would have to be something like below to cover labor as well as the amortized cost of the hardware:

  • $6 per TB written
  • $4 per TB read or verified
  • If we supply the tapes, add the published cost of the LTO8 tapes with barcode from TapeAndMedia. Or we can overwrite/append to an existing tape that you sent to us first.
  • LTO8 tapes can store up to 12TB / 10.9 TiB of real data. Ignore the compression ratings. If you have data that compresses well, do it on your side before uploading - it will be cheaper for you.
  • $20 setup cost if total read/write/verify cost for a job is under $100
  • Add sales tax and shipping

So e.g.

  • 2 TB: $12 write + $8 verify + cost of a tape ($58) + $20 setup = $98.
  • 10 TB: $60 write + $40 verify + cost of tape ($58) = $158.
  • Restore 10 TB: $40 read + $20 setup = $60
  • You can skip verification if you want. I would not recommend it since there is a network copy involved as well.

Would anybody be interested in this kind of service at these prices?