Right now I’m creating a nightly restic snapshot of my server on borgbase and on some spare drives, and keeping the snapshots forever. There’s a ton of daily churn in my data though, between databases and logs and other files that don’t constitute ‘real data’ but might be needed to restore the app.
What’s the catch, why don’t we use those? I/O speed? Limited read/write cycles? I imagine it sucks if you need files on opposite ends of the tape.
The tapes are $5 but the drive was $400.
It’s linear, so you have to pull a whole backup at a time, but it is possible to store multiple unique backups on a single tape, and only pull one.
The drives are crazy expensive if you want to use a somewhat recent generation.