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

[Steve Petrie, P.Eng.]

Hello Lennart,

Thanks for your message.

My comments are inline below.

Steve


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
To: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng." <apetrie at aspetrie.net>; "GTALUG Talk" 
<talk at gtalug.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Advice -- Building Debian 8 PC To Replace Win XP 
PC;


> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 01:51:33PM -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via 
> talk wrote:
>> "Easy, fast, reliable" sounds pretty tempting to me.
>>

<snip>

>
> I thought all modern tape drives were SAS these days.
>

They are but SAS is way overkill for my purposes.

> Hmm, VXA, that used to be exabyte, which was 8mm helical scan.  After
> dealing with DDS I would never trust helical scan for my data.  No 
> way.
> Wears out tapes so fast and so unreliable.  Well DDS was, although I
> guess those were 4mm tapes.  It looks like VXA is better than that,
> but I still see it listed as "The most reliable helical scan", not
> "the most reliable tape format".
>

My experience hasn;t been so bad with DDS-4. The occasional hard read 
errors on verify phase of backup. A tape reformat usually fixes these. 
Or discard the tape and use a new one. They're inexpensive.

> It's too bad LTO is rather expensive to buy a drive for.
>

Yes, too expensive. And LTO cartridges are too large for my liking.

<snip>

> My experience with USB drives is that 3.5" drives tend to fail when
> transported, while 2.5" drives are much more durable, but slower and 
> of
> course smaller in capacity.
>

I'll gladly take a slower and smaller capacity 2.5" USB drive, to get 
durability.

> Another annoyance with tape is that should your place burn down, you
> now have to locate another tape drive of the right type to read your
> backup again.  That can be a hassle depending on how popular the model 
> is.
> A USB drive is certainly a lot simpler that way being entirely self
> contained.
>

Very good point.

> -- 
> Len Sorensen