I know several people must be involved in backups so I thought I might pose this question. What backup media do you / would you use for a business? I know there has been some that have stopped using tape media and now do backups to disk but is this a smart approach. To quote the O'Reilly book PC Hardware in a Nutshell by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson.
"Uncorrectable error rate is the minimum number of bits the drive is expected to read successfully before encountering an unrecoverable error. An unrecoverable error is one for which the drive cannot reconstruct the data from ECC data. When that happens, the data is irretrievably lost. For example, a typical tape drive has an unrecoverable error rate of 10-15. That means that the drive on average reads 1015 bits (more than 100,000 GB) before it encounters a read error that cannot be corrected using the ECC data stored on the tape. For comparison, typical hard drives have an uncorrectable error rate of 10-14 and typical CD writers 10-12. That means in the course of reading the same amount of data the hard drive generates 10 times as many uncorrectable errors as the tape drive, and the CD writer 1,000 times as many." http://books.google.com/books?id=kG8LcWfruOAC&pg=PA285&lpg=PA285&dq=tape+drive+vs+hard+drive+uncorrectable+error&source=bl&ots=xi35kbg1iG&sig=vyMd67nlcW7LuuFj7jQQpSqSmUs&hl=en&ei=FnukTKn5LIOB8galo_mEAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CDAQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false If tape is the best option, what tape drives and tape media have you found to be the best? -- Matthias A. Johnson
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