WARNING: Clear QIC Tape Bands

[Grant Taylor]

On 1/18/22 8:33 AM, Jonathan Chapman via cctalk wrote:
> https://i.imgur.com/48EfOQG.jpg

Ouch!

With my luck, that would have been the index / start of tape marker 
rendering the rest of the tape mostly unusable.

> That's after sitting parked a couple months.

Um ....  I would naively think that would invalidate any test / concern 
unless it was specifically for the problem that you're describing.

> I have a Dysan doing it too. The Dysan had been re-banded with a boiled 
> 3M band and run for years like that with no shedding.

Is that belt or tape media?  I (mis)took it to be tape media.

> I have another Dysan with a green Plastiband in it which is also fine, 
> minimal/no shed. So, I think we may need to re-evaluate if the clear 
> Amazon cheap "plastibands" are perhaps totally incompatible with tape.

My naive understanding was that they were Good Enough™ to get data off 
of the tape as in one (or a few) last hurrah(s) for data recovery. 
(Comparing multiple reads.)

> I know, I know..."just use the band to get data off." But I want to 
> *run* QICs without having to destroy them constantly.

I wince at the idea of running with QIC tape.  But my experience is with 
QIC-80 tapes of the '90s which were so unreliable as to be in the same 
category as AOL floppy disks during the late '90s around the transition 
to CD-ROMs.  As in I would trust an AOL floppy disk to better hold my 
data for a week than I would a QIC-80 tape to hold data for a month, 
much less a year.  ...and I didn't even trust an AOL floppy to go from 
computer to computer for 5 minutes.  --  Talk about a race to the bottom 
for quality.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die