| Jim Sherman 2004-10-26, 5:45 pm |
| On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:06:44 GMT, Curious George <CG@email.net> wrote:
>On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 20:08:39 +0100, "Linea Recta"
><mccm.vos-spamtrap-@hccnet.nl> wrote:
>
>
>Short answer:
>it better satisifies needs of media rotation, data archival, handling
>& shipping offsite, and high quality tape has a much lower error rate
>than disk.
It only is more reliable if you do a verify of every tape, every time,
which is easy on a disk and very slow and labor intensive on a tape.
I've learned the hard way that the dual-head read-after-write tapes
can still produce garbage just when you need a good backup to recover
from. Then there's the head-cleaning issue and the number of backups
each tape is certified for to keep track of. I rotate 2 Maxtor
USB/Firewire drives for my level two (offline) backups. I do the
initial backups to a dedicated on line IDE drive on a separate
controller from my system stuff - with verify on.
The cost is another significant factor. Tape media is expensive and
wears out frequently. Tape drives are expensive and slow and unless
you buy the multi tape jukebox variety ($$$!!!) require an operator to
swap tapes. My entire backup fits on a 60 GB drive and runs
unattended at 4am, with transparent, on-the-fly incrementals in
between.
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