u/StavrosDavros

I’m in Sydney and our west-facing deck (around 5m x 3m) gets hammered by afternoon sun, especially from like 2–6pm. It gets so hot that we barely use it in summer, and the glare comes straight into the living room too. I’ve been looking into retractable awnings as a middle ground since I don’t really want to build a permanent structure like a pergola and we like the idea of being able to extend it during peak sun but still retract it in winter for light.

The one who have retractable awnings, are they worth it? or what are your suggestions?

My deck is basically unusable after like 2–3pm, just full glare and heat, can’t even sit out there properly and so has been all sumer. Tried umbrellas but they don’t really cover enough and get annoying with wind, now thinking what can we do for future.

I’ve been looking into more proper shade options and started going through an awnings buyers guide after realizing this isn’t a quick fix type of problem. Seems like there are way more setups than I thought (folding arm, retractable roof, etc).

What actually worked for people long-term, especially in hot Aussie conditions? and what do you recommend ?

We have a couple of racks in a colo that are basically just old tape libraries gathering dust. LTO-4, LTO-5, some LTO-6. They were set up years ago for eternal backups and compliance stuff. Now? I'm not even sure what's on half of them.

The drives are getting flaky. Finding replacement parts is a joke. And every time someone asks for a restore from 2019, it's a whole ritual - find the right tape, hope the drive reads it, wait forever.

We keep talking about migrating to the cloud but nobody wants to own the project. It's slow, it's boring, and it's not a hero task.

So my question is - what are the rest of you doing with your legacy tape stockpiles?

A few options guys-

Buy newer LTO drives (like LTO-8 or 9) and slowly read everything onto disk. Expensive, but feels safe.

Send it to a service that just handles the whole mess. Seems clean, but I worry about handing over physical media.

Do nothing and hope we never need to restore anything older than 2 years. (Current strategy. Feels bad.)

What's working for you? Anyone gone through a big tape migration recently? Hit me with your war stories - good or bad. Also, if you've used a third-party migration service, how did you handle security/compliance? thanks guys