8 mm tapes

On 9/23/10 10:52 AM, jim s wrote: MMDV (My Mileage Definitely Varied) :) I too have some that are readable, mostly from Exabyte 8200s (2.3GB) but some from 8500s (5GB). At least they were still readable a few years ago. These were definitely the exception though. The company I worked for around '92 had an 8200 and a bunch of video tapes when I got there, but had never set it up. My first results were ok, but the second set of tapes were full of errors. I guess the first time I just got lucky. We got into the habit of running a head-cleaning tape after every two or three uses of the drive; that helped a bit. My boss insisted on getting an 8500, though I wasn't convinced of the efficacy of the technology. I wanted to just stick with our trusty QIC-150 and use a bunch of tapes for incremental backups. He wanted full backups every time (I think he didn't really understand the incremental backup concept) which made the 150MB QIC-150 tapes impractical. Results with video tapes for the 8500 were terrible; not a single tape worked well. We bought data-grade tapes (Sony QG-112M I think) and that improved things, but it was still pretty bad. At my next company we had a brief dabbling with an 8200 but replaced it with a 4mm DAT, with which I had had some experience at a small consulting job. I liked DAT at the time, but hadn't really put volumes of data through it. I wish I had, because I fought tooth and nail to get us a DAT drive at that company, but boy was that a mistake. They were only marginally more reliable than the 8mm Exabytes all told. It took a few years of running double backups until we got a truly reliable tape system: DLT. That was 1995, and I am still sold on DLT (and its descendants) now. Super fast, super reliable. My home network's backups are running to a 64-tape juke with four SDLT-220 drives. I also found your comment regarding 1/2" tapes interesting. I'm assuming you mean 9-track, as there are many 1/2" tapes that aren't. In my experience ("mileage"! ;)) 9-track is the only tape format that's anywhere near as reliable as a DLT. Of course we're talking 150MB vs. 200+GB per tape (for my current drives) so it's very much apples and oranges. 9-track tape reliability depends very much on the particular drive in use. (though I suppose that's true for any kind of tape) -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL