From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Oct 10 19:58:28 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9C7FB14EB5 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 19:58:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id VAA50152; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 21:58:04 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 21:58:04 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: Greg Lehey Cc: patl@phoenix.volant.org, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why use tape for backups? (was: backup method reccommendation?) Message-ID: <19991010215804.A50053@dan.emsphone.com> References: <19991011112417.S78191@freebie.lemis.com> <19991011120854.U78191@freebie.lemis.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre3i In-Reply-To: <19991011120854.U78191@freebie.lemis.com> X-OS: FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In the last episode (Oct 11), Greg Lehey said: > On Sunday, 10 October 1999 at 19:21:12 -0700, patl@phoenix.volant.org wrote: > > On 10-Oct-99 at 18:54, Greg Lehey (grog@lemis.com) wrote: > >>> A second disk gets you only one generation of backup. And if > >>> something catastrophic happens during the backup, it may be > >>> corrupted too leaving you with -no- backup. > >> > >> Well, that can happen with tapes, too. > > > > Yes, if you are foolish enough to reuse a single backup tape > > instead of at least switching back and forth between two. (Or, > > better yet, having a real backup cycle among multiple tapes.) > > The same argumentation applies to disks. It's a lot easier to swap tapes than disks :) > > Maybe DDS wasn't the right choice. I've been using Exabyte 8mm > > backups for years, both personally and at various companies; and > > I've had more problems with disk drives going bad than I have with > > tape drives. > > I've used Exabyte and DDS. I've had many problems with each. Our company started with DDS, then moved to Exabyte, and now we're using DLTs. Our Exabyte drives needed cleaning every 5 full tape passes, and our DLTs go months without cleaning. For home users, either Exabyte or DDS is okay. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@emsphone.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message