On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 10:30 -0400, James Knott wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
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. Quite so. Many years ago, when I was a computer tech, the operators had a machine just for testing tape integrity. If the tape didn't meet specs, it was tossed.
This is especially true when compared to the failure rates seen in optical meda - which is flat-out a *terrible* archive format. CD and DVD is dramatically shorter than most expectations. The storage conditions recommended for optical media [constant 10°C - 15°C and 20% - 50% relative humidity] is much narrower than for tape; and all burned optical media is extremely sensitive to UV radiation. I couldn't even begin to list the number of times I've been at customer sites where data from CD/DVD was not recoverable - fortunately most are smart enough to keep multiple [as in 3 or more] copies of all data archived to optical. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org