Truenas backup on LTO tapes

Hi, Most often than not, when we hear about backup it’s on another truenas server or a cloud provider. However depending on how much data you have to backup, this can be really expensive really quickly.

In my search for a cost-effective and reliable solution I’ve come across LTO tapes, and I think this is a good solution even with the quite high pricetag to get in due to the drive readers being very expensive. It’s still way cheaper than going to the cloud or even having a second server.

I guess the question is has anyone here implemented such solution and is willing to share their setup/experience ?

My plan was to get a Dell PowerVault LTO8 external reader connected in SAS to a PCIe on a XCP-ng server and doing a passthrough to a “backup” VM. From there I would run a backup software (TBC) to keep track of the archived data. However this seems quite inefficient and I wish I had an option to connect it to Truenas directly - but this thread seems to indicate it could be a bit tricky if I wanted to use the LTFS.

This seems like it should be a popular topic and yet it’s not talked about much so any feedback from experienced user would be greatly appreciated!

You’ve probably already read this, but ixsystems is not supporting LTO backup, they are discouraging it.

I did see some things about LTFS being a problem on BSD, this suggests you might be better off running Truenas Scale to have the Linux OS base.

After that, I have no experience with LTO past LTO2 many years ago.

While LTO might be a cheaper than drives and we do a LOT of storage consulting we only have one client using any type of tape system. Most everyone buys a second NAS and keep the data there.

LTO is still sometimes used to move large video projects from one place to another, but even that use is fading. A fast site to site VPN transfer is more often used these days.