Tired of Tape?

Backblaze B2 can store your digital media files in the cloud—for less than LTO.

Calculator: LTO vs. B2 Cloud Storage

Existing Data:

Yearly Added Data:

Daily Incremental Backup:

How Many Years:

TOTAL COST FOR X YEARS

+ See details on Cost and Operational Assumptions

Migrate Large Data to the Cloud

The Backblaze Fireball is here to help easily and securely move massive data sets from on-premises to our storage cloud.

If you have X GB to transfer, it would take less than X of savings to pay off the Fireball transfer fees.

Meet Fireball

CAPACITY: 96 TB

NETWORK: 10 Gigabit Ethernet

No Delays on Data Retrieval

The steps of retrieving a file.

LTO

Order from storage facility
Pay expedited fee then wait
Load index
Retrieve file

RESULTS:

Hours & Dollars

Backblaze B2

Log in to your B2 Account
Locate the file you need
Download file

RESULTS:

Seconds & Pennies

Durability

LTO

You need to cycle back and check your LTO tapes regularly for readability.

Cloud Storage

Backblaze B2 automatically checks every file for consistency on a regular basis. B2 Cloud Storage customers can rely on industry leading

durability - that means they can recover decades old files instantly. Data stored on LTO has to be migrated at least every 10 years in order to be accessible.

Every day our customers recover files that have been stored in the Backblaze cloud for the past 10 years.

Resources

Case Study

Fellowship Church replaces their 25 tape LTO system with B2 Cloud Storage for their 25 TBs of weekly video archiving needs

Whitepaper

Cost Comparison: B2 is the first cloud storage option that is more affordable than LTO

Knowledge Base

Migrating Your LTO Archive to the Cloud

Range is 1 GB to 10 PB

Range is 0 GB to 10 PB

Daily Incremental is too large for daily backup to cloud

Want to run a free proof of concept for more than 50TB?

Contact Sales

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Tape Capacity	24,000	24 TB - the amount of data on 1 LTO Tape assuming 2:1 compression
Daily Incremental Tapes	24	Number of tapes needed for daily incremental backups (up to 24 TB of data per tape)
Full Backup Tapes	7	Number of tapes needed to do a full backup - Weekly 3, Monthly 3, Annual 1 (up to 24 TB of data per tape)
LTO Tape Max	150	Maximum cost of LTO-8 tape
LTO Tape Min	60	Minimum cost of LTO-8 tape
LTO decrease	20%	Decreasing cost per year of LTO to from Max to Min
Tape Unit Cost - New	$7,500	Cost of a new LTO-8 Eight cartridge autoloader tape with 1 read/write head purchased today
Tape Unit Cost - Future	$5,000	Cost of a new LTO-8 Eight cartridge autoloader tape with 1 read/write head purchased down the road.
Max Tapes per Day	2.2	The number of tapes that can be loaded per day with 1 LTO system
Tape Loading Time	9.5	Number of hours to fully load an LTO-8 tape with 24 TB of data
Maintenance Contract	$600	Cost per year for each LTO unit. On-site repair/replace service, next business day, parts and labor, 9x5 coverage.
Tape Pickups/Year	52	The number of times the tapes are picked up / dropped off each year
Pickup cost per visit	60	The cost each site visit (contract value/number of visits), includes 4 emergency visits (once a quarter)
Time spent on LTO	2.5	For each LTO system: Hours spent each week working on LTO based backup/restore/maintenance activities.
Annual personnel cost	$104,000	Annual salary + benefits, FTE who manages LTO system(s) - $50/hour
Wage growth	2%	Annual wage increase for LTO person
Cost of Storage	$0.005	Cost of storage per month per GB (Backblaze)
Download percentage	10%	Percentage of data downloaded each year, based on the total amount of data
Cost of Download	$0.01	Cost to download 1 GB of data
Network Cost (monthly)	$400	Incremental cost to upgrade network speeds (symmetric 500 Mbps minimum).
Time savings versus LTO	25%	Percentage of time used when using cloud storage versus LTO
Data retention	30	Days data is retained before old incremental versions are deleted