Preservation of correspondence

Jim Leonard wrote: I've always used DLT for backups in recent years; far as I'm aware they have a reasonable level of error detection / correction information built in at the lowest level, I don't see them dying out for a long time, and I prefer the fact that the media's self-contained (unlike CD / DVD which runs the risk of attracting dirt / fingerprints due to handling). I tend to keep two copies of any data on separate tapes (uncompressed tar format) plus a third copy on a hard disk (which only gets plugged into a system for the duration of a backup run). Test restores are always done, using the cksum util on each restored file for comparison [1] against the original data just to verify tape integrity. [1] Yes, tar has some verification options built in, but at least for the GNU version the documentation seems to be a bit lacking; I'd trust cksum's output more for detecting any problem files as it's not entirely clear what exactly tar does for the verify step. cheers Jules