Do You Trust Tape Backup

Oblivion

I was intrigued by this BBC item, Sony Tape Smashes Storage Record http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27282732


'Sony has developed a new storage tape that is able to hold up to 185 terabytes (TB) of data per cartridge.'


But isn't it the same old stretchy stuff that splits and disintegrates after a few years? I'm embarrassed to admit to how many backups I lost to unreadable tapes in the bad old years. Why should I trust it now?

Johnmcl7

When you say bad old years, how long ago are you meaning? Over the last decade or so I've used DLT, LTO2 and currently LTO4 tapes for primary backups at work and very few issues with them even thought they're kept off site so some sets are being transported on a weekly basis. I've not done many old restores but the few I've done have been fine, I'm not aware of any viable alternatives for tapes at the moment aside from offsite disk to disk backups but those bring their own issues.

John

Oblivion

Johnmcl7 wrote: »

When you say bad old years, how long ago are you meaning? Over the last decade or so I've used DLT, LTO2 and currently LTO4 tapes for primary backups at work and very few issues with them even thought they're kept off site so some sets are being transported on a weekly basis. I've not done many old restores but the few I've done have been fine, I'm not aware of any viable alternatives for tapes at the moment aside from offsite disk to disk backups but those bring their own issues.

John

Interesting John, I'm as old as Methuselah so my experiences of tape do go back a long time. Perhaps tape technology has advanced then ... but old prejudices are hard to overcome.

There's simply too much physical reliance on tape movement for my taste ... twisting, snagging, bad surface layering .........

colin79666

More reliable than plates of rust spinning at 10k rpm :-)

Johnmcl7

Oblivion wrote: »

Interesting John, I'm as old as Methuselah so my experiences of tape do go back a long time. Perhaps tape technology has advanced then ... but old prejudices are hard to overcome.

There's simply too much physical reliance on tape movement for my taste ... twisting, snagging, bad surface layering .........

I think tape technology has come along considerably, my initial use of tapes for data were on the good old Commodore64 where of course they were completely rubbish.

I was surprised when I started work in IT that tapes were used for backups but the tape is heavy duty and I find very reliable. Before we changed to LTO4 (four times the capacity of LTO2) we were going through a lot of tapes every day but it was rare to see a bad tape.

John

ManAtHome

I've used a fair number of tape systems at home (from the days when a 20MB disk was BIG) - can't remember any real problems other than slowness. Loads and loads at work from a single 'deck' which looked and sounded like a washing machine up to one of them robot libraries - guess that's where the Sony tapes are aimed at.

For home use, NAS drives are probably cheaper than tapes (and tape drives), but then I don't have massive collections of vital stuff like Star Trek...