Depends on the needs. Tape will keep longer unpowered. A traditional HDD is a bit riskier if left offline and unpowered for a while. Even if they're all powered in a tower, I'd still recommend something like Backblaze for redundancy.
If you're storing 50TB of data in B2, that's $3k/year. For that price, you can make 2x copies of your data on tape, and then buy two tape drives to read them.
B2 is an upgrade option. You can still store an unlimited amount on their standard plan, or upgrade for a little bit more for access to a year's worth of changes. It would be worth it to keep a separate desktop with a dozen drives connected and pay for a second annual subscription if you have that much data.
The one-year retention plan adds $24/year. Even the "forever" retention plan for 50TB would only add $250/year.
If we're talking about home use, B2 really isn't necessary. And if you want a daily rotation every day for a year the tape costs can add up, depending on how much data Cha he's day to day. For home use, an HDD backup combined with something like Backblaze seems like a pretty reasonable cost for two layers of redundancy and a year's worth of file versions changes.
Kind of a hypothetical scenario for me—backing up 50TB to cloud would saturate my uplink for a full year and more. By comparison, it’s about four days of drive time on LTO-5. So while LTO-5 is a plausible way for me to store 50TB of data, cloud storage is decidedly a fantasy.
Personally—gonna say I don’t trust arrangements where I know the other side is losing money on the deal. This includes “unlimited” storage. I put “unlimited” in quotes because all of these other services with unlimited storage have, at some point, gotten shut down their unlimited storage plans. That’s why I compare to B2… not really interested in gambling on those things. So I would take B2 as the baseline for comparison when you're talking about this much data.
Amazon once had an unlimited storage option, if you recall. One data hoarder was recording cam girl streams and had just north of 1 PB in his Amazon Drive folder. Whole thing got shut down shortly after.
Bandwidth limitation is a great example of how specific circumstances should dictate backup protocol. Tape absolutely makes sense there even in a home environment. In your case, if it was really critical, I'd probably want to get two tapes at certain intervals so I could ship a copy off site and have the off-site copy online in a dedicated server at a data center so I could retrieve critical files if needed. Probably too extreme for a home setup unless it's a home business, but I've also had to restore from an overnight tape when a database went corrupt (multiple times) so if I was still involved in that sort of sys admin work I'd be a bit paranoid.
As for financial issues with "unlimited", Backblaze has a roughly 15 year track record and has been profitable for almost as long. They're not a typical startup looking to pump up a customer base by selling below costs and then dump to an exit acquisition or IPO. Storage is cheap, and they have managed to build a business that doesn't screw up the economics of low marginal costs by becoming overly bloated.
That said, they're still one of of two layers of redundancy I use for my home backups. I've seen cloud services lose files, so I'm banking on the fact that my own storage won't go down at the same time as two cloud services.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Even though both b2 and a second tape copy are both "a copy", I'd wager than something stored in the cloud has much lower failure chance than a second tape copy.
> You're comparing apples and oranges. Even though both b2 and a second tape copy are both "a copy", I'd wager than something stored in the cloud has much lower failure chance than a second tape copy.
Depends on what kind of failures you're thinking of. A tape won't erase itself if your subscription lapses or if the service you chose finds itself on "Our Incredible Journey." As a home user, both those scenarios are pretty high on my list, since I don't some team to make sure my data is always migrated and accessible. There are a lot of scenarios where some bit of data may need to sit passive unattended for years/decades, and/or be discoverable and usable by someone else (e.g. family sorting through a dead person's things).
The idea behind having two copies on tape is that it’s an easy way to get redundancy without special software. This makes it comparable to Backblaze, which presumably uses erasure codes, which allows them to achieve better redundancy with lower overhead (Backblaze’s storage can survive a higher rate of failure, and the encoding requires less overhead than a second whole copy).
What would be unfair is comparing Backblaze against a single tape copy.
However, two copies on tape is a pretty good backup. Paranoid, even.
Having had to restore from tape in very stressful circumstances, if I still did sys admin on that sort of thing I would definitely be paranoid enough to want a second tape off-site. If not daily, then at least on some sort of regular rotation. Though it would depend on the criticality, and for anything really critical I'd want a colo storage server as well. If the data is critical then even for a relatively small business $15k in upfront costs for the tape drives and lots of tapes and annual costs at the colo center wouldn't be all that much.
