> Tape drives IMHO is brain damaged technology.
> They are more unreliable than
Your experience differs from mine. I use an Exabyte Eliant-820.
It holds 5gig/10gig (hardware compression) on a $3 8mm tape. I
have been doing backups every night for 5 years with this (8mm)
technology, and have _never_ had a tape error. I personally do
feel that tape technology is the correct answer to backup needs,
it is the only thing that is reasonably affordable in the modern
day of 30 and 40 gig hard drives and burgeoning disk files. I
will certainly admit that there are brain-damaged _drives_ and
_technologies_ being sold out there, such as the Travan style
stuff where the half of the drive is bundled in a $40 cartridge
in order to make the drive cost cheaper up front, but that doesn't
stand as an argument against sequential tape technology in general.
Decent tape technologies are _very_ reliable (not to go into the
issue of how many moving parts exist in a helical scan device, which
does argue in favor of streaming technology instead of helical).
-Tom
