21 Sep
2004
21 Sep
'04
5:33 a.m.
On Mon, 2004-09-20 at 20:36 -0700, Zane H. Healy wrote:
FWIW, I've never had a problem with reliability of the tapes - it's the
drives which fail ridiculously often.
These days I have enough storage that I backup to spare 'offline' hard
drives and 2 copies of everything on DAT, plus I keep two working DAT
drives around at all times just in case one suddenly dies on me (as
happened *again* just a few weeks ago).
As with Teo I use DDS2 drives so the amount of data on any one tape
isn't *that* big (for the same reason I use lots of small-capacity hard
disks rather than one big one)
On Mon,
2004-09-20 at 15:59, Teo Zenios wrote:
> Tape is still the best method for archiving files, if its not worth
> the time
> to backup a file to DAT then the file is not worth backing up (keeps
> you
> from archiving things you will never need). I use cdrs for music and
> copying
> other cd's.
PLEASE tell me you don't archive data to DAT tapes! They're DAT and
8mm tapes are among the worst storage formats around. If you must archive to tape, archive to DLT,
I still regret selling my DLT 7000 drive a few years ago. I got it free
when it was thrown out from my old work; it had been dropped and the
mechanism shifted inside and jammed - only someone had lost the
paperwork and it couldn't be returned under warranty so just got
chucked. Ten minutes with a screwdriver and it was operational again.
Wish I'd kept it now...
cheers,
Jules