[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[dperkins at techangle.com]

We use tape backup in our products.  Many of our customers put a tape in
the drive and never change it.  Others change it every 6 months. 
Sometimes a  hard drive crashes and we use the tape to restore the
application configuration and data.  Occasionally we find that the
customer's tape is bad.  Sometimes the backup log shows that there was a
failure.

One customer had the write protect set on the tape.  When his drive
crashed, he lost about 8 months of data.  Not good, especially since the
EPA required 3 years of data.


Those big mainframe tape drives had special heads that would read back
what was just written on the tape and compare it with what had just been
written.  I don't know if smaller tape drives have such heads.  Probably
not.




> With all this talk of backups... So you all take backups to your chosen
> media. How many of you have done a restore from backups? I guess that
> very few have. How reliable have you restores from backups been?
>
> Match
>
> On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 17:17:53 -0600
> David Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> wrote:
>
>> David L. Willson wrote:
>>
>> > OK, I'm no newbie, and I find myself asking the same damn question
>> > every time I get into the Backup & Disaster Recovery design process.
>> >  Why does any
>> > business with less than a TB of data to backup use tapes?  Why, why,
>> > why, when almost any fixed disk media is much cheaper and almost as
>> > easy to take offsite?
>>
>> In one office, I was using CDs.  When I outgrew that, I switched to
>> external USB drives.  This is nightly full backups taken off site
>> every day.  It happens to work in this case.
>>
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