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Ask Slashdot: Personal Tape Drive NAS?
New submitter hey_popey writes "I would like to piggyback on a previous Ask Slashdot question. Do you know of any realistic way to use a tape drive solution at home, not as a backup, but as a regular NAS? I would like, for example, to save the torrents of my Linux distributions on it, and at the same time, play the family videos on a computer. It would seem at a first glance that the transfer rates and capacity of Linear Tape-Open (1.5TB, 280MB/s in 2010) and the functionality of LTFS would allow me to do that, but I don't know the details, or whether this would be economically viable."
I'm not sure you've got the point. Images of Linux distros are big, contiguous files that you want to access rarely and read linearly - probably just the thing to go on tape. To a certain degree, video is the same - one big file that you want to read linearly.
Of course, the practicalities might not be so great. If you want to share the torrent back with the community, then that's a problem. So is wanting to skip around in a video.
But I don't think the question is quite as insane as you make out.
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... there used to be a product called "Desktape" made by a company called Optima Software.
Basically it kept a cached (on the system drive) directory listing of all the files on the tape, and then made a (virtual) disk using that directory which was mounted on the desktop (hence the name). The user would perform file transfers with this "disk" in much the same way as he would a real disk, he could copy files to and from it by dragging and dropping, similarly erasing or copying over files. Note that I said file transfers; direct random access to this "disk", while possible, were strongly recommended against because the tape would seek to one block, then seek to the next etc. so, for example, launching an application from the tape was ill-advised. Anyway, when the tape was ejected, the directory would be updated on the tape.
Still it was great because it made backing up very simple (no special utility to run) and this disk would behave just like a real disk so that you could run regular disk utilities on it like "Virtual Disk" (which kept searchable online copies of directory listings of offline volumes).
The software was hardware agnostic which means it could work with a variety of tape drives so maybe it would work with LTO. Alas, the software only ran on pre-OS X Macintoshes and the company is long gone. I would dearly love it if someone could revive this software and make it work with a "modern" OS! Can't someone buy the IP of this company?, surely the development (patents?) is worth something. (I wish there was some sort of law saying that abandoned software like this would, after 5 years, be put in the public domain; of course for this to work the source code would have to be continually archived at, say, the Library of Congress in case of sudden bankruptcy. Not too feasible.)