Still waiting on the FC interface card to arrive and for server rails but it was a very good price and it gave with 10 free tapes of LTO 5 (it is an LTO 5 drive but I ordered an LTO 6 drive to add in)
Their eBay response was "I decided it was a bit much for my needs." To which my response was "Yeah it's a bit much for my needs as well but that's why we have a homelab hobby, isn't it?"
I'll take good care of it. Looking at adding an LTO 6 drive too and I've already got 3 people interested in co-owning it just for access to the LTO technology for cheap archive backups
As of now my backup data is non-existent but with this I'll be able to have my 2 copies in 2 places with an off-site cold backup, entirely because of how cheap these drives are.
I'm going from "raid is my backup" to a proper 321 backup with this alone.
I bought it as a treat to myself for making it through finals week. I've been stressed out and when I stress I look at server tech. Just happened I was researching LTO backups and this was too good of a deal. The backup plan was a dual drive LTO 6 SAS(but allegedly qsfp+) that is the Dell clone of this library. (Iirc that was 700)
Worth noting that, occasionally, an LTO drive writes tapes that it can read perfectly fine, but other drives can’t read. If all your backups are made using this drive and it dies, they might be totally unreadable - no matter how many copies you made on tape.
This is because the tape head shifts a little, so it writes to the tape on an angle that normal drives can't read. It used to be a problem on old ibm drives but to my knowledge not recent ones. Though the drives are a wearable part so you need to maintain and replace them periodically.
I picked this up for $390 after tax and a 1.5 hr drive for local pickup. (Well. My dad picked it up. He was going to that city anyway)
Throw in 30 for the hba card and it's still a good deal.
The seller included the tape for free which made it such a steal.
LTO is only good for backup data and I'm only sitting at 8tb of NAS data, most non-essential. But this is going to save me so much in cloud backup fees.
For what it's worth, I've been quite happy with Proxmox Backup Server and how it handles tapes (as well as how you can install the agent on just about anything running linux to back up... anything). Haven't tried bareos, I'll need to give that a whirl.
I've never tried proxmox before. Unraid was my VM platform of choice before because I never really needed any. But with my limitation of only the one desktop class PC server(for a pcie hba interface card) I need to learn it and get unraid migrated to a virtual environment.
Also with the LTO I will be switching to truenas
I'll have some Linux VM that I'll pass through the controller for, I have a 1.6tb Intel p3600 that I'll use for spooling (but I would like it to primarily be a cache drive for truenas.)
A scheduler should allow me to spin it up every week to do the weekly backup tapes.
I put in a proxmox hyperconverged cluster at work and a proxmox backup server as a target for the backups. Daily backups of VMs and a few network storage locations, then rotation schedules of how many per week/month/year get stored on the backup server. From there I have some cold storage (one time writes to tape and those tapes live in the library so I can pull from them if needed) and then weekly offsite tapes that contain only the most recent, verified backups of each VM and storage location. Once the system's been there long enough I'll have some monthly/yearly immutable tape backups that will live in the library but for now the weekly offsites suffice. All of this is automated (except me taking the offsite tape out of the mail slot and putting in one of the older offsites, then telling PBS to ingest it and be ready for the next offsite write). So far has worked well for us.
I used this LTO library or a very similar one at my old job for archiving purposes
We used Bacula, which is a free opensource software. BareOS is a fork of that if i understand correctly
Well, no. If you burn a bridge, you are saying that "you are not doing it" or you are "cutting off the task". When you cross a bridge, it means you'll do it when the time comes, as in - you'll worry about an issue, when you get to it, in serial order.
Edit: It is kind of wild to me that tape backups were so common for nigh on 30 years we got robust open source tools & standardized formats but in 'the industry proprietary', non-standard, and purely rent seeking alternatives are heavily used.
All ltolibraries include a free version of ltfs which includes a library edition that allows you to mount the tapes as a series of folders on Linux via ltfs.
There are also backup software that can use tapes the more traditional way.
Never used bareos, can't tell you anything related to that. Every software solution will have some positives and some drawbacks, that's how everything works. I find that LTFS has the best chance of surviving either mistakes or catastrophic events.
Also, I use windows, which also has it's downsides with LTO in general.
But back to LTFS (on windows), after setting it up (which is always an adventure), it works like a drive. You just need to respect and think about actively how this is LTO, it is linear, you can't delete files, they just become invisible, but you don't get the storage back. You need to plan ahead if you want to use the most of it. So small little annoyances that add up to something larger is my experience with LTO, just some examples.
I've only worked with single drives (no librarys) and SAS (even tho I have some FC drive laying around iirc). Even have a atto pcie card for SCSI, but LTO 4 and earlier is something that is not necessary for a practial use case in 2025, at least in my opinion.
Good that you picked LTO 5 and higher. As you'll only use LTO 6 at the most rn, you won't have problems supplying a steady stream of data to the drive, since LTO 7 this can actually be a problem as its max transfer rate is 300 MB/s, lower then a HDD. But instead you'll have another downside, LTO 5 maxes out at 140 MB/s and LTO 6 at 160 MB/s. And that's slow. You'll need to plan ahead. Filling an 1,5 TB LTO 5 tape takes at least 3h, an 2,5 LTO 6 tape takes at least 4h and 20min, both calculated at the best speed, which you might not get, for whatever reason.
I'm repeating myself, everything is a tradeoff, good luck hahaha (LTO is great tho, the amount of space I have is more I'll use for a long time)
A customer of the company I work at got their Quantum Superloader 3 replaced, only cuz they thought it was broken, but it's not, it just needs a firmware upgrade. A colleague asked them if he could have the "broken" one, and they said yes. He's gonna pick it up for free, next time he's in the vicinity :D
Awesome, so in regards to software? How are you planning to handle that? Veeam's community edition kinda killed off tape support, so that makes it difficult. Are you wanting to run LTFS on this? or use it more as, backup a share, label it, and push it to the tape with proxmox backup? I guess I'm asking what is your ideal process you have in mind for this.
No idea what ltfs is, all I need it to do is to store backup data so every week to every month I wipe last months backup and write the new one. Every 3 months to 6 months I will make a copy of this backup and move it off-site (retrieve old tapes but keep recent and 2nd most recent off-site)
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Hey, I’m the guy who sold you that tape library! I hope you enjoy it!
Omg, no way!
It's a small niche world.
I'm still waiting on the rails and the FC interface card
Indeed it is! I’m surprised you found rails for that. I wish I had them when I was using it.
Universal server rails.
It's effectively a shelf the server sits on.
My backup plan was "well it's fiber, let's store it in the shop because I've got 4 unused strands of that fiber cable that already goes there"
Why u sail it
Their eBay response was "I decided it was a bit much for my needs." To which my response was "Yeah it's a bit much for my needs as well but that's why we have a homelab hobby, isn't it?"
Yeah, that’s pretty much it, and I haven’t used it in a longtime. Glad to see it go to a good home.
I'll take good care of it. Looking at adding an LTO 6 drive too and I've already got 3 people interested in co-owning it just for access to the LTO technology for cheap archive backups
As of now my backup data is non-existent but with this I'll be able to have my 2 copies in 2 places with an off-site cold backup, entirely because of how cheap these drives are.
I'm going from "raid is my backup" to a proper 321 backup with this alone.
I bought it as a treat to myself for making it through finals week. I've been stressed out and when I stress I look at server tech. Just happened I was researching LTO backups and this was too good of a deal. The backup plan was a dual drive LTO 6 SAS(but allegedly qsfp+) that is the Dell clone of this library. (Iirc that was 700)
XD
Worth noting that, occasionally, an LTO drive writes tapes that it can read perfectly fine, but other drives can’t read. If all your backups are made using this drive and it dies, they might be totally unreadable - no matter how many copies you made on tape.
This is because the tape head shifts a little, so it writes to the tape on an angle that normal drives can't read. It used to be a problem on old ibm drives but to my knowledge not recent ones. Though the drives are a wearable part so you need to maintain and replace them periodically.
Well shit. This is an IBM lto 5. I ordered an LTO 6 and plan to use primarily LTO 6
Well, might want to keep an eye on it then.
Don't the servo tracks on the LTO tapes take care of head alignment? That's their job.
Too much use of cleaning tapes kills tape drives.
How much tb per drive u backing up
Holy shit
Yesterday: talking myself out of another 20tb drive
Today: I should buy a tape drive...
I picked this up for $390 after tax and a 1.5 hr drive for local pickup. (Well. My dad picked it up. He was going to that city anyway)
Throw in 30 for the hba card and it's still a good deal.
The seller included the tape for free which made it such a steal.
LTO is only good for backup data and I'm only sitting at 8tb of NAS data, most non-essential. But this is going to save me so much in cloud backup fees.
What software are you planing to use?
I cannot afford enterprise software.
Proxmox and a VM that has bareos
But I have no idea if there's a better option.
I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.
For what it's worth, I've been quite happy with Proxmox Backup Server and how it handles tapes (as well as how you can install the agent on just about anything running linux to back up... anything). Haven't tried bareos, I'll need to give that a whirl.
I've never tried proxmox before. Unraid was my VM platform of choice before because I never really needed any. But with my limitation of only the one desktop class PC server(for a pcie hba interface card) I need to learn it and get unraid migrated to a virtual environment.
Also with the LTO I will be switching to truenas
I'll have some Linux VM that I'll pass through the controller for, I have a 1.6tb Intel p3600 that I'll use for spooling (but I would like it to primarily be a cache drive for truenas.)
A scheduler should allow me to spin it up every week to do the weekly backup tapes.
Monthly , and quarterly for longer term.
But if it's manual that's going to suck.
I put in a proxmox hyperconverged cluster at work and a proxmox backup server as a target for the backups. Daily backups of VMs and a few network storage locations, then rotation schedules of how many per week/month/year get stored on the backup server. From there I have some cold storage (one time writes to tape and those tapes live in the library so I can pull from them if needed) and then weekly offsite tapes that contain only the most recent, verified backups of each VM and storage location. Once the system's been there long enough I'll have some monthly/yearly immutable tape backups that will live in the library but for now the weekly offsites suffice. All of this is automated (except me taking the offsite tape out of the mail slot and putting in one of the older offsites, then telling PBS to ingest it and be ready for the next offsite write). So far has worked well for us.
I used this LTO library or a very similar one at my old job for archiving purposes We used Bacula, which is a free opensource software. BareOS is a fork of that if i understand correctly
Veeam Backup and Replication works really well. Especially if you can grab an older one that doesn't have weird license requirements for tape.
Do you know what version doesn’t have those requirements?
I spent months ripping my hair out with it before going tar on a simple Ubuntu VM and writing some scripts to make it one command for a tape server
9.5 didn't. The one I have now doesn't either, I'll have to turn on my tape VM in proxmox to check. Give me a few.
Checked, I'm running version 11.
Thank you
Running version 11.
Use LTFS for archiving, locking stuff away on proprietary software not a recommended for archiving.
Oh no! Don't burn that bridge when you get to it. Instead, cross that bridge when you get to it. have a good night.
Tomato tomato 😉
Well, no. If you burn a bridge, you are saying that "you are not doing it" or you are "cutting off the task". When you cross a bridge, it means you'll do it when the time comes, as in - you'll worry about an issue, when you get to it, in serial order.
tmoty tmoty ;)
It took me longer than I want to admit to realize what you did there
BareOS is command line. And not easy to get your head around at all.
Enterprise software? tar (Tape ARchive).
Edit: It is kind of wild to me that tape backups were so common for nigh on 30 years we got robust open source tools & standardized formats but in 'the industry proprietary', non-standard, and purely rent seeking alternatives are heavily used.
Learning the mt command and its friends should be mandatory for those that want to play with tape drives.
This looks more like a tape stacker than an ATL.
All ltolibraries include a free version of ltfs which includes a library edition that allows you to mount the tapes as a series of folders on Linux via ltfs.
There are also backup software that can use tapes the more traditional way.
Lets fucking goo!!
Let's fucking LTOO!!
Get an LTO cleaning tape, as the tape heads do clog with use.
Verify your tapes after they have been written as you do get the occasional failure.
Already ordered one.
Thanks for the advice
If your storing media like video/audio files you may want to look into using LTFS format.
My god. The convo between the buyer and seller here is like someone adopted a new dog 😂
Good luck sorting it out. But once It's working LTO rocks.
If anyone wants i have a quanrum scalar i40 with dual drive LTO6 im trying to get rid off.
Ive moved to cloud backup lol
Pmd
LTO is great, until you actually have to use it (this is my own experience) hahaha
Good luck on your journey. I recommend using LTFS. Don't make it to complicated to yourself, as LTO is complicated enough (also my own experience).
That's good to know. I'm in way over my head with how much I need to overhaul my servers just to accommodate it.
Why not use bareos over ltfs?
Never used bareos, can't tell you anything related to that. Every software solution will have some positives and some drawbacks, that's how everything works. I find that LTFS has the best chance of surviving either mistakes or catastrophic events.
Also, I use windows, which also has it's downsides with LTO in general.
But back to LTFS (on windows), after setting it up (which is always an adventure), it works like a drive. You just need to respect and think about actively how this is LTO, it is linear, you can't delete files, they just become invisible, but you don't get the storage back. You need to plan ahead if you want to use the most of it. So small little annoyances that add up to something larger is my experience with LTO, just some examples.
I've only worked with single drives (no librarys) and SAS (even tho I have some FC drive laying around iirc). Even have a atto pcie card for SCSI, but LTO 4 and earlier is something that is not necessary for a practial use case in 2025, at least in my opinion.
Good that you picked LTO 5 and higher. As you'll only use LTO 6 at the most rn, you won't have problems supplying a steady stream of data to the drive, since LTO 7 this can actually be a problem as its max transfer rate is 300 MB/s, lower then a HDD. But instead you'll have another downside, LTO 5 maxes out at 140 MB/s and LTO 6 at 160 MB/s. And that's slow. You'll need to plan ahead. Filling an 1,5 TB LTO 5 tape takes at least 3h, an 2,5 LTO 6 tape takes at least 4h and 20min, both calculated at the best speed, which you might not get, for whatever reason.
I'm repeating myself, everything is a tradeoff, good luck hahaha (LTO is great tho, the amount of space I have is more I'll use for a long time)
A customer of the company I work at got their Quantum Superloader 3 replaced, only cuz they thought it was broken, but it's not, it just needs a firmware upgrade. A colleague asked them if he could have the "broken" one, and they said yes. He's gonna pick it up for free, next time he's in the vicinity :D
I hope you picked up a cleaning tape too. those are needed after so many cycles of backup. The drive should tell you when it needs cleaned.
I did! Just waiting for it to be delivered.
Awesome, so in regards to software? How are you planning to handle that? Veeam's community edition kinda killed off tape support, so that makes it difficult. Are you wanting to run LTFS on this? or use it more as, backup a share, label it, and push it to the tape with proxmox backup? I guess I'm asking what is your ideal process you have in mind for this.
I was thinking bareos?
Whatever it is it will be on a proxmox VM.
No idea what ltfs is, all I need it to do is to store backup data so every week to every month I wipe last months backup and write the new one. Every 3 months to 6 months I will make a copy of this backup and move it off-site (retrieve old tapes but keep recent and 2nd most recent off-site)
Linear Tape File System. (LTFS for short). You should be fine with proxmox's solution then.
You know these fiber one are quite popular with tv studios for local programm footage archives (former studio tech)