18 May
2001
18 May
'01
11:36 p.m.
At 06:32 PM 5/18/01 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
But if you don't have automatic fast forward (and
some way to judge the
approximate postiion of the tape automatically), then finding a
particular file is consists of rewinding the tape to the start and then
reading the tape (at normal speed) until you find the file you want.
Which, using one side of a C90 cassette, could take 45 minutes. This is
going to get boring fast.
You've got to get out of basement more often, Tony. :-) Why, just
yesterday afternoon I made several hundred dollars babysitting someone's
WinNT box, coaxing its 5-gig Travan cart tape backup unit to
retrieve one 13K file, and that took about three hours total
to find the two tapes, read the catalog from the tapes, then
get the file. Fortunately, there were other things to fix
around that office. The 1200 baud speed of the 1541 drive
did cross my mind as I waited.
- John