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Comment by kanzure | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a complete copy? The seeds are very slow. I know someone willing to pay for this data. Shoot me an email.

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The _whole_ thing? It's 54 TB, how do you plan on receiving it?

What are you talking about? "I'll show up with hard drives and whatever I have to do. I'll rent the damn Amazon snowball truck if I have to."

Then just get the torrent ... Adequate payment will be seeding 2x.

The complaint is that the torrents are slow. Which I can confirm, the trackers seem dead and the DHT hasn't found anything yet.

I think tape would probably be the best choice --- a single LTO-7 tape cartridge holds 6TB and costs <$100USD. Of course the drive is quite expensive, but HDDs are less reliable and more expensive per GB.

The scale usually tips towards LTO at around ~100TB or so (give or take 20TB depending on where you are located and how good your negotiation skills are), and that's only if you can afford a tape downtime until you get a new one (in case it breaks), and to refresh the whole library come LTO-10 (because it won't even be able to read your LTO-7 tapes).

It almost always makes better sense to back up to hard drives that carry their own connectors and "tape" with them -- I've recently found two disks from 2001 in storage. I needed a $15 IDE-to-USB connector because I don't have IDE connectors anymore. And there were 16 bad 512-byte sectors over one 20GB disk, and no bad sectors over one 15GB disk. Easily readable.

I also had a couple of backup tapes from the same era inside the same box I found. The required drive brand is not even listed (it's not LTO), and I'd be surprised if (a) I can find a tape that can read them, and (b) if they still work properly.

But I don't need them, because the drives they backed up are still readable .....

Tapes are only good for offline storage.

If you want online storage, you'll need one drive per tape, and you would get huge lookup times.

> Tapes are only good for offline storage.

> If you want online storage, you'll need one drive per tape,

No, tape libraries exist, and would be considered 'nearline' storage.

https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/storage/tape/library

> and you would get huge lookup times

Yes. This is not a good system for random access.

Indeed. But the initial investment is very expensive.

It depends on your financial scale. A fancy tape library, sure, but if your company is in-sourcing hundreds of TBs of backups surely you are not destitute. Glacier is always cheaper.

On the other hand I paid $185 for a LTO-5 drive a year or two ago (no library, manually operated). 1.5 TB on a $20 tape is still pretty good in my book.

It's just five 3.5'' HDDs (12TB ones), which would amount to about $2,000 or a little more.

Can't you just attach it to the email?

Since this is technically very illegal I'd be inclined to view your message as a bait to capture and jail one of the very first people who managed to mirror the whole thing.

No offense, just seems fishy.

Were they to help you, would that person not be opening themselves up to >avg legal harm?

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