Get that on Tape!

We live in the era of the cloud - cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud backup, cloud everything. Once I was fine with this, as it meant that I didn't need to worry about backups, or having a large enough storage space, or even if my house burned down, I'd have my data. Yet as we continue farther into Trumps presidency, I keep reading new articles of "{Big Company} delete data with no warning" like this, or this, or this. The result of this has made me start to wonder about all the things I thought I could forget. Things like

"What happens if {service} just deletes my stuff?",

the short answer is - I'm {a little} fucked.

I have a NAS where all my data lives, along with a backup of those services. Its running a 10 Raid, which will prevent any immediate loss of data. Yet, it has no backup, no way to recover if the house burns down, or I get attacked by ransomware, or some other form of mass data loss. 

The more I wondered about these questions, the more I looked into the retro-futuristic technology of tape archiving. I had known for a while that datacenters, financial institutions, and probably Google, used tape archival for data that's meant to be saved for long term, like federally mandated financial papers, or long storage backups. What I wanted to know was, was it feasible for me to run my own tape archive? Was it exorbitantly expensive? Was it supported by my systems?  Could I set it up to have a couple of offsite tapes( for the purpose of 3-2-1 backups)? So far my journey has given me some answers, but not all the ones I want. 

First lets tackle the question of cost. When I first looked into it, I decided to price out a new machine, mostly because I like to know the current price and current generation before digging into what's available. That way I have a baseline to start with, and I can go from there. Pricing out new machines, specifically the HP StoreEver MSL2024, I got really excited for a bit, as the base machine was about $2K, which with some saving up for like 6 months, I could probably swing. Then I noticed that the base machine did not come with a tape drive and the cheapest tape drive was $5K; Add in tapes, and a mandatory service contract, and suddenly the machine cost ~$12K. This was not feasible, and I quickly remembered why enterprise equipment is only bought by companies. Though, it did give me a base line to look for while I was perusing Ebay looking for used units, ones that included a tape drive, and looked like they could do what I wanted them to do. Luckily I found a machine with a slightly older drive, well within the budget, and quickly scooped it up, along with the "support" equipment it needs to actually operate ( fiber cable, HBA card, tapes, rackmount kit, etc). In total I've spent about $1K in buying all the things, but don't yet have all the things delivered, so I may need to spend a little more if it turns out that I bought the wrong optical transceiver.

Next let's talk about if its compatible with my systems. The short answer is "kinda". There's a forum post describing how to setup TrueNas, which is what I'm running for NAS software, to use a tape archive. This covers some of my problem, but unlike the original author of that post, I expect my backups to take more then just one tape. Which means that I'll probably have to modify his methods to split the data into a "tape" size, then copy it, and then tell the library to change the tape. All of which is unknown territory to me as I've never worked with a tape library before, so it'll hopefully be an exciting, and not frustrating, adventure. 

Now onto the question of the day, is it feasible? Signs point to yes, as you can get a used tape library for a reasonable amount, and based on the forum post above, all you need for software is a generic linux box. I can't say for certain that it is, as maintenance tasks, and other issues may arise as I discover how to best utilise the tape library, but so far I'm optimistic.

But with all this talk, the large question that should resonate with you reader, is:

How fucked am I when {cloud service} delete my account for { arbitrary } reason?