Source for refurbished Tape Drives or Drive Repair

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Kristian Hermansen <kristian.hermansen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am interested in why you have decided to stick with tape.  I have
> read research papers that claim tapes fail nearly 100% of the time
> given some pretty common constraints (time, backup method, rotation,
> etc).  IIRC, this biggest factor was the high probability of failed
> restoration from a backup tape.  In the end, it should be cheaper to
> backup to disk, right?

There are two reasons that I believe tape still beats disk:

1) The cost per gigabyte is less on tape
2) You can more readily keep one or more offsite copies with tape

What I do is keep a couple dozen tapes on a 3-month rotation in a 15-slot
jukebox.  I'm sure the cost has fallen since my last tape purchase; back then
I think I paid about $25 apiece for AIT-2 tapes (50Gb native capacity).  Disk
drives have gotten cheaper but I still can't quite envision buying a couple
dozen of them to hot-swap in and out as readily as I can with tape.

Also, I use the software tool Amanda to manage my tape rotation.  It could be
modified to use hard disks instead of tapes, but such support isn't
off-the-shelf.  And to get the same config I've got now, I'd have to figure
out some hardware way to be able to load 15 drives into a hot-swap cabinet: 
probably more expensive than the used AIT2 jukebox units that can be had on
eBay.

Maybe others here have done exactly this and I'll go with removable hard disks
instead of tapes next time.

Tape media errors happen about once every year or two on my system.  I simply
pull the offending tape out of rotation.  Any single failure is not a concern
because I have so many copies of each permanent file; I might lose data but
only if a failure happened to a tape holding recently-created files.  I won't
ever face the kind of loss I incurred during a 1997 burglary, when my most
recent backup (to QIC cartridges and diskettes) was 2 or 3 years old due to
the onerous tedium of all my previous backup methods.

-rich


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