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To: tcmay who wrote (142653)	9/3/2001 3:55:50 PM
From: tcmay	Respond to of 186894

Another point about CD-Rs for backup: I wrote: <<4. Multiple CD-ROM drives. I happen to have 2 CD-ROM drives in my laptops, 2 in my desktop machines, and 3 external CD-RW drives (of varying speeds and vintages). Not to mention an old drive or two I may have gathering dust that could be pressed into service. This means that the backups I have created can be read by _any_ of these 7 main CD-ROM drives. By contrast, when a tape drive craps out, the choice is either to try to get it repaired or to buy another one. (Paul can outline his thinking on this.)>> I should have pointed out that what this means is that I have high confidence I can read my backups on any of these 7 drives, and will be able to do so for many years into the future, even many decades. CDs and CD-ROMs are here to stay. And if I all of my present CD-ROM drives were to somehow be destroyed or stolen, any new machine would have a CD-ROM drive and could read the backups. Yes, CDs and CD-ROMs are here to stay. The same cannot be said of tape drives, which have a blizzard of names and types: Travan, Qic, Exabyte, DLT, TapeStor DAT, Viper LTO, etc. Not only do most people not have _multiple_ of these, in the same way they have multiple CD-ROM drives, but in a few years they may find no way to read their old tapes. --Tim May

To: tcmay who wrote (142653)	9/3/2001 4:54:29 PM
From: Robert Salasidis	Respond to of 186894

The failure rate of most tape media is in the order of 10^17 bit error rates. Looking at the PLextor web site I see numbers in the order of 10^12. I agree though that the drive may fail with more frequency that a CD-R drive (to me that is less important than the data, so myself I am willing to have to replace a drive on occasion (I did have an exabyte drive that was 6 years old die on me once) as long as the data is safe). Tape's next major advantage is speed. You can get 3-6 Mb/sec for less than 1k$, and you can get 10-20 Mb/sec for about 4.5k$ (with several price points in between). If slower is acceptable then less than 500$ SCSI is even easier to find. The ability to do 7-110 Gb (depending on the drive) per tape, allows an overnight unattended backup - this alone means that the backup has a higher chance of being performed on a regular basis. Setting up a small office/home network, allows a single tape to do an unattended backup of every computer - keeping in mind that the speed of 100BaseT connections will limit the backup speed somewhat if you are using higher end devices. An important negative for tape in this context is that if you want to do full backups which would allow remote system recovery, the cost of the software (Backup Exec, ARCServe etc) is expensive - 1k$ or more. If you are simply copying the files remotely (and not the system registry/state then 100$ software does the job quite well in Win2k (or using the built in program that comes with Win98) On the negative side, the drives and the media are more expensive (but the media is still competitive on a $/Mb point of view - especially if reuse of same media is considered). Another negative is that it is one more device (whereas CD-R drives do serve a dual (or even triple) role) Sorry I did miss the part about off site backups. I did not doubt you were aware, or that you may have even used tape. My only reason for the comment was that tape is often overlooked as being inappropriate for most people's uses which I think is false.