Poll; Tape drives

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 02:54:42PM -0500, Madison Kelly wrote:
> Quick, informal and terribly unscientific poll...
> 
> 1. Do you still uses tape drives?

No.

> 2. If you were looking at a new backup system, would you want to use 
> tape drives?

No.

> The reason:
> 
> Back when I wrote the first version of TLE-BU, I had a lot of people ask 
> if it supported tape drives, or if I would add support for tape drives. 
> I decided back then that, in the next version, I would add support for 
> tapes.
> 
> Now that time has come and I am trying to determine how much of an 
> interest people still have in tape drives. Is it worth the (relatively 
> considerable) effort to add support for tapes in this day of cheap 
> "disk" storage? Why *would* someone choose to use tape these days?

Unless you are backing up huge amounts of data and have a robotic tape
changing archiver I wouldn't bother with tape.  And the tape would have
to be linear (I won't ever use helical scan tapes.  Much too unreliable
and wear out so fast).  That means DLT, LTO or similar.  Those are
expensive though, which is why unless you are doing a large library, the
drive cost is just too high.

Disk based backups are cheap, simple, and much easier to restore in case
of disaster recovery (some people fail to include an externally stored,
known to be working tape drive to read back their tapes along with the
correct software.  Backup tapes you can't read are no good).

--
Len Sorensen
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