I will beat on tape for backup. MY tape drive faithfully backed up onceOh come now Civilme! Due diligence here! If you do no maintenance on your back up system, you get what you deserve. I'm absolutely amazed that you let your tapes fall into that state.
a week and I rotated 6 tapes to stay current. (MAC fileserver 80).
Then one day I arrived at work to find the fileserver unresponsive. I eventually powered down and found the disk would not boot and enough of
it was corrupted to make the rest inaccessible. OK no problem, data is on tapes, let's reload OS--- done reach for tape
Oops--tape is unreadable
reach for two week old tape--Errrr gee that one is no good either
Tapes sent to data recovery service--well whattayaknow They charged
quite a bit to give me the bad news that six years of work was lost.
The employer was too cheap to give me a separate workstation, so it was
my six years of work that was lost. For the same reason, it was risky to try restoring from tape though I had always done one file a month. Anyway,
the tapes were stretched and dirty and the drive was unusable.
I have been burning CDs since that time, even when the burns were at 1X.
Civileme
Just like any backup strategy, it requires maintenance! Your statement above is like saying:
I didn't change the oil in my car for 3 years, and the engine died. That proves cars are no good".
Sorry to beat up you, but you deserve it for even making the statement:
> tapes were stretched and dirty and the drive was unusable.
<rant>
So you threw a junky old tape, in a piece of crap tape drive, and the backup/restore failed? Gee.. really? I guess that proves beyond all doubt that tape backup systems can't be trusted.
Didn't anyone bother to check this thing periodicly?
Your backups are only as reliable as *you* make them. "Garbage in, Garbage out".
</rant>
Over the years, I've seen you give a lot of good advice, and help a lot of people. I've had a great deal of respect for you. But I guess everyone has their areas where they are just another "DAU" <grin>
Ok.. I'll admit, I've lost data to faulty backup systems. But it's usually been my own fault.
The short side of this is: CDs provide nowhere near the capacity required to do regular backups of changing data. And.. I really don't want to make perminant backups to CD-R of data that changes regularly, it's just wasteful.
Besides, there is no way, I can backup my multi-T-Byte systems (at work) to CD!
Tapes are not perfect, but they're the only option when you have large amounts of data. But they're only as good as their maintenance.
Ric
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