 Okay, so obviously our devious plan to backup our entire petabyte server to Google Drive's cheap, unlimited tier was going to hit a snag at some point. And from talking to Wendel over at LevelOneText, that point seems to be at about 150 terabytes of storage when they start throttling you, like literally. So fine then, it's okay, because we had a backup plan anyway. Why store your data in the cloud when you can store it on tapes? It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes. I am getting hot, I will take my clothes off. This is the Meg Store TRB3-HL8, a Thunderbolt 3 equipped tape reader that even in 2018 costs about 10 times more than your mom or dad's Hi-Fi did back in the 1980s. Yes, my friends, this puppy will run you about $6,000 for the single-deck version, or $9,000 for a dually. So how on earth does that make any sense? Let's start this story by backing up a little bit. Aha, I get it. So when I was growing up, the way to archive data long-term was using optical media. So the CD was high on its victory over the cassette in the music industry. I think I have a CD around here somewhere. Oh, yes. Optical media, remember that? Anyway, CDs were slow and inconvenient to create, assuming that you could afford a CD burner at all, but their massive capacity meant that compared to floppy disks, oh, I have those too. Check it out. Compared to floppy disks and even ZIP disks, you could store what felt like an unlimited amount of at least certain types of files, because remember that a 1.44 megabyte floppy, minus formatting overhead, could only store like a handful of even basic things like homework assignments. Over time, though, portable hard drives, which have come down in cost dramatically over the last decade or two, and cloud storage, which is undeniably more convenient for small backup jobs, have gradually displaced optical media in spite of the booster shots that optical disks have gotten along the way, like rewritable capabilities, the capacity upgrades that DVD and Blu-ray brought. There's just a practical limit to how small you can make the little bumps on these plastic and foil frisbees before the cost to make them just stops making sense. But that doesn't mean that the expensive drive, cheap media model is dead at all. In fact, all this time, quietly in the background, tape storage has been alive and well in the enterprise space with even modern supercomputers, like the SFU Cedar installation that we toured last year being equipped with state-of-the-art tape libraries. This product is a little different, though. So it's the same actual drive that you would find in a data center. They're actually all made by IBM these days and then rebadged. So it's LTO8, which means that each of your tapes is going to have a total of 12 terabytes of storage. Now, there is this 30 terabytes on here, but that assumes that whatever data you're putting on it is highly compressible, so that would not apply to the kind of media that we would be backing up, in fact, for most things. Very few people use it, so 12 terabytes is really what you can count on. And then it also means, LTO8, that we are compatible with either these LTO8 tapes or LTO7. Normally, you would get two generations of backwards compatibility, but there was a materials change to barium ferrite that made that impractical this time around. All right, so why did they put all this work into creating a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for a tape drive? Well, for people like me, who have hundreds of terabytes of data, but who don't necessarily need lightning-fast access to it. So, what we're going to do is give it a try. Now, when I first set this up, I actually did it on a Windows machine, but quite frankly, I wouldn't really recommend that. It's not a fantastic experience. There's this whole annoying rigmarole to get the drivers installed. You have to disable driver signature enforcement. You got to make some changes in the BIOS. It's a real hassle, but once you do get it working, assuming that you can find an app that cooperates, there are some driver issues on Windows as well, it is a lot more painless than it used to be. Now, in the old days with tape drives, you used to have to take all the files that you wanted to archive, wrap them up into another type of file called a.tar file or a tarball, and then if you wanted to pull anything off of it, you had to pull the whole thing off, and then you could pick out the one file that you needed. Now, it's basically drag and drop, so whether you're using Finder or Windows Explorer, it's a much more seamless experience. Let's go ahead and load this puppy in. Oh! Doesn't that sound delightfully retro? That was so cool! Listen to it go! So it takes like 30 seconds or so to initialize, but we're just going to enjoy those sounds together. So the thing about tape is that it has to be read from and written to linearly. There's no read-write head that can jump around on the media, and obviously, unlike solid-state storage, it can't just grab an address and pull the data directly. So you're going to hear a lot of it reeling and unreeling tape whenever you use the thing. So this is a piece of software called MyLTO. They have a more advanced version called Preroll Post that has a bunch of database features, but basically what this is, you don't, strictly speaking, need it, but what it is is it's a piece of software for helping you keep all of your backups organized. So in the event that you want to go back and pull like an old news story or something to refer back to it, you know exactly where to go, which label to tape to pull, and where exactly in the folder structure you would find the files that you're looking for. It's going to take a couple minutes here to figure out exactly how much data is in this folder on our NAS on the vault. So this is pulling off a petabyte project. So that took about 20 minutes, but the bottleneck here is just our network connection to the vault. So now we can go ahead and begin. So as you get to breaks and files, you're going to hear it kind of rev down, but in general, we're able to do anywhere from about 150 to 200 small change megabytes per second, and that's over the network. You can actually do as much as 300 megabytes per second under ideal conditions. So if you, like me, were thinking initially when you saw this, well Thunderbolt 3, 40 gigabit per second, like is that kind of an overkill interface for this? The answer is actually not as much as you might think. So there's still about 15 hours left in order to copy about 4 terabytes of data, and I believe it typically quotes this in terms of copy time. There's also a verification process that it has to go through that takes almost as long as the initial copy. So to be clear, it's not like you're going to be editing video off something like this or anything like that. Like if you have to grab one file that's on one end of the tape and then one file that's on the other one, the whole thing has to spool through like it's crazy slow. But while there is still a purpose to having quick access to a lot of our footage, so it's not like the vault is going anywhere, so over Thunderbolt with a 10 gigabit network connection, we can easily back up an entire tape over the course of a day. And the costs compared to hard drives in Storinators start to make a lot of sense once you get over about the 100 to 200 terabyte range. Add to that that these things are rated at a 30 year shelf life, compare that to hard drives whose lubrication will kind of wear out and seep away causing them to die over time, and tape might just be the way forward for us. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But who couldn't like that sound? But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should definitely join.