Price vs value for DLT tapes

"Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote: For data backup, it's a false economy to compare the cost of the backup media to the cost of other backup media or to the cost of gas or to the cost of tea in China. The true comparison is the cost of making a backup vs the cost of not making a backup. For more than a decade folks have argued about the cost of backup media vs another backup media, and ignored the cost vs value of doing the backup at all. The cost of the media has been in the noise compared to the effort involved for a long long time, at least for those of us in the West. (Maybe things are different in former Eastern Block countries or subsaharan Africa, not that living at the South Pole might distort any of our senses of economics!) For almost any application, the convenience vs inconvenience of the backup is going to drive any consideration more than the cost of the media. DLT does have a very good advantage over others in convenience in that there is a good (although not perfect) history of drives being backwards compatible over ridiculously long time spans. There are OTHER factors - I made backups onto 9-tracks into the late 90's mostly as a justification for keeping dozens of drives around, not so much because it was the best or right way! If you want to pick up the tapes as a way of justifying keeping the DLT drive around, that's great: well into the late 90's I was still stockpiling vast quantities of Blackwatch tape (I mean, thousands of tape in a haul) just as part of my spinning tape reel obsession :-). But once the other non-economic factors come in, you have to acknowledge that you are no longer making decisions based solely on some hypothetical economic factor and abandon the economic comparisons. Tim.