On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 06:37, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 1:30 AM, Kurt Buff <[email protected]> wrote: >> Tape wear should not be much of an issue, if you eliminate >> shoe-shining. Modern tapes (LTOx, and later, I think) are rated for >> enormous numbers of read/write cycles. > > Are you sure of that? Last I looked (which was LTO2), the tape > manufacturers were still advertising 2000 passes. A "pass" is defined > as the tape moving across the read/write head. LTO uses serpentine > tracks, so running the entire logical tape from start to end results > in several passes. I believe most modern tape systems work the same > way. Assuming you do a full verify with every backup, a single > night's backup could easily mean ~10-20 passes. > > -- Ben
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Tape_durability Seems pretty durable to me - 4 years, if entire tape written once per week. That seems unlikely. This includes the supposed automatic/built-in verify after write, but does not include 3rd party tape read for verify after write. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
