8 May
2007
8 May
'07
5:11 p.m.
--- Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
DLT is great, I use it a lot, and we also use it at
work. Very reliable from what I've seen, only time you
run into issues is with the drive itself, and really,
really worn out tapes. If possible, verify backups on
another tape drive, or at least verify them - I had
one tape drive that would seem to write just fine, and
never report any errors. But the tapes wouldn't read
back! A backup you can't read is, well, not backed up.
Then again, we don't use DLT as an archive - just for
daily backups. I have no idea how readable this
DLTTape IV cartridge will be in 20 years.
Burning DVD or CD's is nice and "archival" since you
can't overwrite them, but beware that some cheap media
isn't really good for more than a few years. Of
course, we've had discussions about media, longevity
and how critical it is to make backups many times
before... So backup often, backup in different ways,
verify backups and most importantly, actually backup!
And if you need to be sure the data will be around for
years to come, you need to keep it live - keep it on
newer media, newer hard drives, whatever.
If the data is _really_ crucial, consider punching it
into tape. Unlike cards, tape can't get dropped and
knocked out of order. It's slow to punch and read
though, so I simply rigged my TeleType to run at 19200
baud. Hold on, the chad box is on fire again...
-Ian
I always
figure there's a lot less to go wrong in
a DLT cartridge than there
is with a hard disk
The flaw in this argument is the time it takes to
make another copy, which needs
to be done at some point to migrate to newer media.
You will only know the DLT has failed when you try
to read it again.