Re: tapes best for backup?
David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@dd-b.net> wrote:
> s. keeling wrote:
> > I've never run across a CD I couldn't still read, and I've a few old
> > ones. DVD, I would expect to be even better. For me, tape's good
> > enough.
> Why would you expect DVD to be better? I'd expect it to be worse, for
> the obvious reasons -- smaller physical bit representations, packed
> tighter.
Yes, about 8x tighter, as I understand it.
> Also we don't have as much experience with it, so I take what
> information we *do* have with larger quantities of salt.
Also, there's a complication with evaluating accumulated "experience":
you may know that ten-year-old DVDs are working fine, but you're
burning on to new DVDs that were manufactured this year. There's no way
to know if some cost-cutting measure has changed their reliability.
Myself, I've been using DVDs for backup largely out of laziness/convenience.
I still have a DAT drive (SCSI, DDS-2... I think) that can do around
2 gigabytes on a tape, which I will probably switch back to for long term
storage. As for "on-line" backups: I mirror my working files between
workstation and laptop.
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