I’m writing a program that wraps around dd to try and warn you if you are doing anything stupid. I have thus been giving the man page a good read. While doing this, I noticed that dd supported all the way up to Quettabytes, a unit orders of magnitude larger than all the data on the entire internet.
This has caused me to wonder what the largest storage operation you guys have done. I’ve taken a couple images of hard drives that were a single terabyte large, but I was wondering if the sysadmins among you have had to do something with e.g a giant RAID 10 array.
I worked at a niche factory some 20 years ago. We had a tape robot with 8 tapes at some 200GB each. It’d do a full backup of everyone’s home directories and mailboxes every week, and incremental backups nightly.
We’d keep the weekly backups on-site in a safe. Once a month I’d do a run to another plant one town over with a full backup.
I guess at most we’d need five tapes. If they still use it, and with modern tapes, it should scale nicely. Today’s LTO-tapes are 18TB. Driving five tapes half an hour would give a nice bandwidth of 50GB/s. The bottleneck would be the write speed to tape at 400MB/s.