[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[David Anselmi]

Match Grun wrote:
> 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?

I haven't (yet) done a full restore from tape.  I've had tapes become 
unusable for writing, don't know whether they have read problems before 
that or not.  But I have done restores from disk/CD and had no problems.

The real trick is to design your recovery plan before your backup plan. 
  At eBay a guy wanted to use tapes for backups and the VP asked him 
what the recovery plan was.  Reading data off tape didn't work because 
down time costs them $738/sec.

Dave