On Sun, 25 May 2003, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

> > I don't think the tapes can take all that much heat, either..
>
> The problem is that "fireproof" containers such as safety deposit
> boxes and safes typically resist flame by generating water through an
> endothermic reaction with high activation energy.  Tapes will survive
> this -- they're designed to -- whereas disks won't.

Actually, at least for my purposes, this kind of thing doesn't really
make a difference. I'm doing backup (for disaster recovery), not
archiving, so losing the backup is merely an annoyance so long as the
original is intact. I just have to make another backup.

For archiving, of course, the situation is quite different. For that,
I'd suggest you make a copy of your important tapes, and test both the
originals and the copies on a regular basis. When either has an error
rate that is too high on a test read, make another copy before further
degredation occurs.

(The tape backup option is also rather more expensive for relatively
small (under a couple of terrabytes) amounts of storage. A half
terrabyte of RAID-protected storage, basically a small PC with four 160
GB drives, is well under a thousand dollars. Last I checked, an 80 GB
DLT drive was going to be a couple of thousand dollars, and 12 tapes
would run me another several hundred dollars.)

Not that I'm trying to discurage this discussion; I still find it
interesting and useful.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC