8mm data cartridges

On Tuesday 08 May 2007 12:44, Al Kossow wrote: I mostly agree here... but at some level of data storage, tape is much more economical to use than hard disk. Up until this year (that is to say, through December 31 or so of last year ;) we have used DLT media for our archival storage system here at work, starting in about '96. Keeping two copies of the data is really essential, but even with the 50+TB of content that we had in the system when we started migrating to our new one (from DLT-IV in a DLT7000 drive to LTO2 tape), we had very little data ever lost, and I don't think any data that got lost could be credited to the tapes - mostly just due to bugs, power failures, etc with our HSM system. But again, we did have bad tapes on occasion (hint: avoid Imation tapes) but they were few enough in number that we never had a big enough problem to lose data on two tapes that had the same data. Still it wasn't too bad, IMO, as some of our tapes had over 1000 tape-mounts, with no problems at all. So, I guess my advice if you want to use DLT tape (or newer, LTO stuff which is starting to trickle down) is to make sure the tapes are in a good, climate controlled environment, make sure you have 2 copies of the data, make sure you clean and test the drives regularly, occasionally read the tapes to make sure your data is still there, so that you can regenerate a 2nd good copy before you have 2 bad copies. Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org