[GTALUG] Advice -- Building Debian 8 PC To Replace Win XP PC;

[Steve Petrie, P.Eng.]

Hello Alvin,

Please see my comments inline below.

Steve

apetrie at aspetrie.net

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alvin Starr via talk" <talk at gtalug.org>
To: "James Knott" <james.knott at rogers.com>; "GTALUG Talk" 
<talk at gtalug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2016 4:28 PM
Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Advice -- Building Debian 8 PC To Replace Win XP 
PC;


> On 08/09/2016 04:15 PM, James Knott via talk wrote:
>> On 08/09/2016 04:12 PM, Kevin Cozens via talk wrote:
>>> I've given up on the use of tape. I use external hard drives for 
>>> backup.
>> You should always back up with tar to 9 track tape stands, the way 
>> the
>> computer gods intended.  ;-)
>> ---
>> Talk Mailing List
>> talk at gtalug.org
>> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
>
> And keep your audio recordings on 1"  reel to reel instrumentation
> recorders like we did at Digital Recording.
>
> On 4mm backups.
> There was a customer who used a 4mm backup and backed up every night.
>
> The one thing someone forgot to tell them was to replace the tapes.
>
> After about 4 years the disk failed.
>
> The tapes were transparent.
>

After the customer's nightly backup process wrote to the tape, was there 
also a separate verify phase, that rewound and read through the entire 
tape, and compared its contents with the HDD data?

Surely a verify phase would have failed with unreadable (transparent) 
tapes. And failure of the verify phase, would have alerted the customer 
to the unreadability problem with the tapes.

> Guess how this story ended?
>

The story ended very badly, no doubt. The cruel "nasty surprise" 
downside, of our beautiful profession ...

> -- 
> Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (905)513-7688
> Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
> alvin at netvel.net              ||
>
>


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