Recommend me a tape drive

[braddock]

Hi,

Help with choosing a tape drive please.

The plan is for our main site to have a NAS for all Veeam backups and these backups will be replicated to our secondary DR site which will also have a NAS.

Monthly archival backups will still be required though and after looking at the options it seems that tape is by far the least expensive option compared to all the (expensive!) cloud backup options.

Our full backup size will be around 6-7 TB, so a new LTO 7 drive may be enough, but since we have so many LTO 5 tapes in use already (as well as the drives) I was thinking of getting a refurbished Dell 124T as a short term measure.

Since the backup is only once per month it's fine for the backup to take 12-15 hours at the weekend, and fit onto 4-5 tapes (according to my calculations).

Is there anything wrong with my thoughts above or does anyone recommend a different model?

Thanks.

[Dima P.]

Hi braddock,

We have an unofficial tape library compatibility list that may help you with this decision. If you ask me, I'd rather go with latest LTO 7 than invest in old generation tape device.

[mae2]

Hi braddock,
we have a LTO7 Tape drive in use (HP MSL2024).
The capacity uncompressed is 5.5 TB.
The files that are saved from Veeam are already compressed. The maximum capacity of 7 TB with LTO 7 can not be achieved. But the transmission rate of up to 300 MB/s is not bad with LTO 7.
Best regards

[braddock]

Thanks for your help all!