On Wednesday 05 Feb 2003 5:17 pm, civileme wrote: > I will beat on tape for backup. MY tape drive faithfully backed up once a > week and I rotated 6 tapes to stay current. (MAC fileserver 80). > > Then one day I arrived at work to find the fileserver unresponsive. I > eventually powered down and found the disk would not boot and enough of it > was corrupted to make the rest inaccessible. OK no problem, data is on > tapes, let's reload OS--- done reach for tape > > Oops--tape is unreadable > reach for two week old tape--Errrr gee that one is no good either > Tapes sent to data recovery service--well whattayaknow They charged quite > a bit to give me the bad news that six years of work was lost. > > The employer was too cheap to give me a separate workstation, so it was my > six years of work that was lost. For the same reason, it was risky to try > restoring from tape though I had always done one file a month. Anyway, the > tapes were stretched and dirty and the drive was unusable. > In our small company we did a fullbackup on Friday and incremental for the rest of the week. The software had tape rotation built into it, so it asked for a specific tape. The backup was, of course, always done when everyone closed down for the night, and there were very many times when I came in next morning to find that it hadn't been done, because the tape header was not readable, so it sat there waiting for a new tape.
In the event, when we had a burglary the tape did restore, but I never really trusted it because of those problems. I used to save to LS120 disks and email myself files too big for that, just in case. > I have been burning CDs since that time, even when the burns were at 1X. Talking of which - do you know any site with information on the different grades of media, with regard to lifespan. I'm careful with storage, but I'm aware that the media I'm using are not really suitable for longer storage. I just don't know how to choose the right ones. Anne -- Registered Linux User No.293302
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