28 Nov
2006
28 Nov
'06
1:22 p.m.
Al Kossow wrote:
Decomposing rubber components has been a problem for
digital tape
transports for at least a decade or more now. I know of no vendor who
supplies replacements for the dozens of different QIC transports, for
example.
My experience of DAT drives is that they would eat tape for fun even
when new ... one or two units seem fine but I had half a dozen
replaced when I was at DEC.
DLT always had the decency to fail in non-destructive ways, the tape
always
survived intact.
Anyone who has historically significant data on tape
should get it
OFF of that media as quickly as possible and onto something that is
more easy to migrate in the future.
But to what should it be migrated. Don't all tape units rely
on rollers somewhere? CD and/or DVD doesn't have a reputation
that fills me with confidence and rotating disks need to be
replicated and kept running otherwise who knows what state they'll
be in when I do want to read something. Plus the disk capacity
explosion seems to have stalled a little - I was expecting 1TB
drives to be standard and cheap by now.
Antonio