8 mm tapes

On 24 Sep 2010 at 9:43, Dave McGuire wrote: We spent about 13 years recommending backup media for a number of government agencies, starting in about 1988. This was in a field application--i.e., not a permanent installation, but rather a "snatch and grab" sort of affair. At the time, we standardized on SCSI, being one of the few external- device interfaces with a standard attached to it. Intially, the most popular was the Iomega Bernoulli drives (5.25"). Heavy, yes, but very reliable and reasonably fast. A few also used the DC-600 (6150, 6250) size QIC media. Not quite as straightforward as Bernoulli, but all in all, not bad. DDS (4mm tape) was a nightmare. About all the devices had going for them was cost (for read-after-write medium, it was pretty good) and capacity. I've not found long-term (>10 years) stability to be very good. 8mm (Exabyte) tape was most popular with the larger agencies and performed quite well. The biggest problem is that it was Exabyte- proprietary and so the drives were single-sourced. After that, the next step was high-capacity MO (e.g. PMC Apex 4GB). The medium wasn't bad, but the drives weren't made for field use and failed frequently. PMC got to be overwhelmed with their swap-repair service and eventually declared bankruptcy. DLT was briefly popular (reliability was great), media and drive cost was high, but using commodity hard drives eventually won out. For me, there are always surprises. I recently came across a cache of backup tapes I made in 1988 using an Irwin (EZTape?) DC-1000 minicart drive. Every single one of the dozen backups was readable. Sometimes, you just never can tell. But you can keep your Datasonix Pereos drives. One of the largest publicity blitzes for a non-working product that I've ever seen. --Chuck