Is tape dead?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 09/15/2015 10:49 AM, Mouse wrote:

> If the police needed to even _consider_ doing that, they need to fire
> whoever decided they didn't need proper backups.  (And whoever was
> responsible for the mistake that got it running there to begin with,
> either whoever decided to let it run or whoever decided to use tools
> that would let it run, depending.)

I think a more important issue in backing up is "How many GENERATIONS to 
you keep around?"  If you're just overwriting last month's backup, you 
could be propagating the effects of a malware or just plain error with 
no means of retrieval.

My backups are currently done by connecting an external drive to a 
system, and booting with a live CD. Important stuff is also duplicated 
on several different machines--and when new technology obsoletes the 
old, carry the content forward on the newer medium.

I back up my original work or valuable reference sources.  No pictures 
or movies.  When you consider how much *original* work anyone does 
during a lifetime, it's surprisingly little.

Maybe that's changed today.  I remember seeing a figure of 11 debugged 
lines of code per day per programmer as the average for a GSA programmer 
back in the 1980s.
---------------
Related to the subject of backup devices, I've been seeing stupid-low 
prices on SSD using MLC flash.  How reliable are these things?  I'm 
still of the spinning rust persuasion, right now.

--Chuck