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From: "Matt Galster" <mattg at timesucker.ne.client2.attbi.com> Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 19:58:11 -0500 I've had numerous heartbreaks with tapes over the years. DAT proved least trouble, and AIT gave me fits on some winnt 4.0 systems about five years ago. I went through two DAT drives -- in very short order -- before giving up on the format. On my first (1994) computer I had one of those cheapie cartridge drives. The drive was reliable, but the media were expensive and not terribly reliable. DAT media are also very expensive by today's standards; DVD's (and even large hard drives) are much cheaper. I'd really prefer multiple off-site copies to a HD than tape. Newer HDs have a much higher reliability than the older HDs had, and they blow away tape unless you go to drives that cost about the same as a new car. Currently I use DVD's for backup. It's rather time consuming, but it's cheap. It took 23 DVD's to back up my stock of images, not counting the 8-10 reburns I had to do (I was careful to use my fastest, but flakiest, DVD drive to verify them; my experience is that if this drive can read a DVD then just about anything can). It's also a good transfer medium. My concerns about using HD's to back up data is the cost and long-term reliability (although perhaps if I'm using DVD's I shouldn't be talking about that). Perhaps I should rethink this at some point. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
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