-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday, 2009-09-17 at 17:29 -0400, Brian K. White wrote:
Per Jessen wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
On Wednesday, 2009-09-16 at 13:34 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Wednesday, 2009-09-16 at 12:49 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
they would not work reliably. None of the tapes we have retrieved from offsite have failed. Our offsite tapes are mostly a combination of LTO-1 and LTO-3.
Ditto, again.
Are there tape systems that may be used for, say, 30 years, by home users or very small sites or professionals? I mean, not data centers with big purses. What can we use?
I doubt if you'll find anything. For one thing, the demand for long term storage doesn't really exist amongst home users or one-man shops. Yes, I'm sure lots of people would like to keep their precious digital photos and videos that long, but that desire doesn't itself create a demand. Not yet anyway. The other thing is that the manufacturers who supply the consumer/SMB market have to keep supplying, and therefore intentionally make things break or improve the technology, but omitting backward compatibility.
Some common formats that are generally backwards compatible, the latest version no longer reads the earliest version, and several that were quite popular and seemingly set for life at the time, have simply gone from the earth with the single company that made them.
That's one thing I hope LTO helps.
Most (all?) other tape formats are owned by some manufacturer, and no other manufacturer may make the drives without licensing and permission from the original producer.
Where lto is intentionally open design that any manufacturer may produce drives at any time.
Since this conversation I had a look on LTO drives, and.., they are quite expensive: 800..1200€... that's a lot for me (home). The tape is relatively cheap, though. Well, about half the price of a HD that size (and reasonable security requires two copies). <http://www.alternate.es/html/categoryListing.html?cat1=026&cat2=075&cat3=000&&tn=HARDWARE&l1=Dispositivos&l2=Copia+seguridad%2C+backup&l3=LTO&>
30 years later, it won't be in the hands of any one company, if they even still exist, to decide if a drive that can read LTO-1 media is made. Demand for a drive that can read some really old tape may drop so low that the original company can't be bothered, but there is usually some other company willing to fill any demand as long as it's legally and financially possible.
I heard that NASA has hard problems reading their own old tapes from old "deep space" missions. Not that old, considering what they study. One of the problems was getting drives to read them, or even computers for those drives. It is a real problem. Currently, the typical/practical solution is to store the data somewhere else before the media is too obsolete. Similar to old librarians with papyrus. Progress.
Although I wish they'd come out with a dat or vxa sized format that's open too. lto is fine for the data center but kind of a lot to ask the owner of a small business to put in his pocket every night and every morning.
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkrD4soACgkQtTMYHG2NR9VGDwCffWyLTo24YTSaEa8rt49hn6Nr DEcAnjALeUaZwIc+GO0ZFKK0+BwC+iPT =kaVq -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----