The Sunday 2004-09-19 at 12:06 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
How much can store one of those tapes? I just checked and the newest SAIT drive can hold .5 TB uncompressed, and they claim 1.3 TB compressed. The drives themselves do the compression.
A lot... still, you need quite a hundred for a full backup, half if compressed. Restoring from scratch can be a real pain ;-)
first was larger than the HD capacity. I wonder if there are tape autochangers, or CDrom autochangers.
Lots of tape autochangers. You can spend $100K on a single 6 foot tall "tape library" with 4 high-end tape drives and room for 100+ tapes. Then count on spending another big wade to fill it up with blank media.
If you really have money to burn, you can gang upto 5 of those together. (ie. they have side doors to pass the tapes back and forth.
Yea, if you have to store terabytes you have got to have money in bulk as well. To keep a bit on topic, do those autochangers work with linux? :-)
I tend to think that optic media is more durable than magnetic media, for long term archiving; teoretically they should not degraded if kept safely. Magnetic fields get weaker in time, I think - but how on earth can a terabyte be saved even in dvds?
For long term storage (15 years) good-quality tape is still the best solution. Optical seems to degrade after a few years, but I'm not sure why. (FYI: the problem is much worse on ones that are burned. The mass-produced pressed ones last longer.)
I read they discovered a bacteria, the biological kind, that eats one of the surfaces or paints. Also, I read or heard that the paint covering the reflective surface degrades with time, and the rumor said it was designed so on purpose. If that is true, it is evil... huh, i should say unethical. Or commercially clever.
If you want to store something for 100 years or so, the recommended solution is still micro-fiche (I think).
Of the silver halide or whatever type. I remember reading some of the original reports when CD media was invented, for digital audio, perhaps in Scientific American. They considered it the ultimate storage media for long term, theoretically for ever. It is distressing to find it may last less than paper. I also read there are big problems to retrieve and store "old" data, like for example, the magnetic tapes recorded from many NASA missions; sometimes the needed hardware is no longer available (like 8" floppy drives). What is the use of converting ages old data to digital libraries, if they will not last even a century? Ah, well... too off topic. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson