In <890694.35414...@web54605.mail.re2.yahoo.com>, on 06/20/2010
at 04:20 PM, Ed Gould <ps2...@yahoo.com> said:
>From my (admittedly dated) perspective, until the ability to share
>disk drives (transparently) I do not see the use of tape really
>decreasing all that much.
What are you using tape for? In some cases it hasn't made sense to use
tape for decades. In others, there's no viable alternative in sight.
I see sites that currently have small datasets on tapes moving them to
DASD, and letting archival software migrate the datasets that aren't
being used. But if you need to keep historical records for decades,
then it's hard to beat the cost of tapes in a vault.
Similarly, for backup you might be concerned about recovering after a
head crash, recovering after a finger check, recovering after a
disaster or a few other scenarios. The factors for each are different.
For some, mirrored DASD are sufficient[1], for some, temporary backups
to DASD are appropriate, and for some, tape is still the best choice.
The above is written under the assumption of making technically sound
choices. If that is not the case, all bets are off.
[1] Assuming that they're far enough away not to be knocked off
the air by the outages you're concerned with.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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