On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 04:22:42PM +0200, Matthias Buelow wrote:
> Jarkko Teppo writes:
> 
> >I have had very good experiences with DLT-drives (and 1600bpi 9-tracks :-) 
> 
> After recently having an HP SureStore DLT 40/80 crap on me (ate the tape,
> and it looks like now the head electronics is fubar) I've lost my faith
> in that technology aswell.  I mean, the thing looks ok from the outside
> but once you open it and see the primitive and fragile mechanism, I
> really wouldn't trust stuff like that with any important data.
> I think maybe magtape is something that should be retired.  These days I
> prefer RAIDs as backup devices.  A lot cheaper than tape aswell.

We back up quite a bit of volume to hundreds of DLT and LTO tapes weekly.
The DLT tapes are 100x more reliable than DDS, and LTO is about even with
DLT.  DDS was good enough, provided you back up frequently enough to have a
bit of redundancy.  Man am I glad we don't use DDS autochangers any more.

There is backup software that will use RAID technology on tapes.  DLT tapes
are definitely more reliable than hard drives, they store better, they can
be dropped on the floor more, etc.  DLT and LTO are both cheaper than hard
drives, unless you buy practically-no-warantee IDE drives.  LTO is fast!

Ben