Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 13:24:16 -0500 From: "David W. Alderman" <dave@persprog.com> To: Open Systems Networking <opsys@mail.webspan.net> Cc: Rob Schofield <schofiel@xs4all.nl>, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: CD-R and Scanner recomendations for CD archiving of records? Message-ID: <35101150.B0DDF674@persprog.com> References: <Pine.BSF.3.95.980317162415.10950H-100000@orion.webspan.net>
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Open Systems Networking wrote: > On Tue, 17 Mar 1998, Rob Schofield wrote: > > It would be MUCH easier, and more reliable for me anyway to just grab a > SCSI DAT drive and archive away. I dont mean to tear down your obvious > love of CD-R, but your guidelines are like that of windows. You can run > windows reliably! Just only run it on tuesdays, BUT you have to have a > black cat ON the monitor, AND it has to be past sunset!! And some holy > water never hurts :) > > I still say after my CD-R problems it's a better choice to just use a SCSI > DAT tape drive. More storage, and will last far longer in my opinion than > CD-R which is aparently quite finicky for more people than just myself. DDS tapes have a fairly short shelf life (does anybody know what it is?).My biggest problem with DDS is its lack of reliability. Let me explain with a now all-too-familiar scenario: Generic Customer Site (aka GCS) is backing up daily with a DDS drive that just passed its one year old mark In that year they never had one problem with the backup and they use a backup program (like Lone Tar or BRU) that does a verify of the tape. One day you get a frantic call that Joe lost all his data and they cannot pull data off the backup. When you arrive on site, you find that the backup has been failing to verify for several days but since they use a reasonable rotation scheme you are able to obtain both a weekly and a monthly tape that supposedly verified. You install a new DDS drive and test it carefully - it works perfectly. It will not, however, read ANY of the site's backups. Needless to say the GCS is not happy and neither are you. You take the tapes back to the office and find that only one of the five identical drives you have in-house will read the backup. Quickly you make a CD-R of Joe's lost data and return that to the site thinking "what is wrong with these DDS drives?" OK. So I added the CD-R bit, but the fact remains that DDS drives seem to have problems with both longevity and unit-to-unit compatibility. My company has been burned many times by this and we switched our in-house backup to DLT for that reason. Does anybody know of a high capacity tape drive that is reliable and interunit-compatible and does not cost as much as a DLT (which you could probably trade in for two Pentium-II class computers)? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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