Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 09:12:19AM -0800, David Brodbeck wrote:On Jan 4, 2008, at 7:38 AM, Larry Irwin wrote:I would not buy a used tape drive. They're finicky mechanical devices and you really want a warranty. Every time I've bought a used tape drive thinking I was getting a good deal it's died within a month.Which puts DLTs out of reach for the home user. Which means that either I archive to less reliable media (CD/DVD, hard disk) or keep everything online and only do backups with no archives.
Why do you think DLTs are more reliable than optical media or hard drives? My experience with tapes in general (not DLTs) certainly does not predispose me towards that view, but I suppose DLTs could be "different". I've never had a CD or DVD go bad once it passed verification, and some of my cds are from the early 1990s (Kodak Photo CDs). I *have* had tapes in every format I've ever used, from 7-track up to DDS, go bad or be unreadable for other reasons. I've also had a lot of the *drives* go bad, which means I'd probably want two or three before storing anything important on the tape format.
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info