Actually that last point is valid. You should never ever actually trust a tape. Buy good tapes, buy good tape drives, keep the tape drive cleaned and don't mistreat the tapes, use bit-level verification** during backus, And despite all that _still_ never actually depend on any single tape. Because the fact is there is no such thing as any mechanical magnetic media that is really dependable, and tape is among the worst, even though there is nothing better. AFAIR, IBM 3480 and STK 9840 tapes come with a 25-year data retrieval warranty. For longterm storage, I would still advocate keeping two copies, but that would be more to guard against other accidents.
I hear the claim against tape all the time: "tape is among the worst" and I always call "BOGUS!". Tape is an amazingly durable archive media. I've been in charge of a vault full of tapes - failures are very rare and frequently recoverable. People having problems with tape simply haven't been maintaining their archive correctly (cycling out old tapes, maintaining the tape drives, etc...). I've read from tapes that looked like they had been to hell and back - without fail. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org