Tape Drive review comment: What Price Data?

"And so the bottom line for backup-conscious users is this: You have to thoroughly work your way through all standards, identifying your preferences and the device that is right for you by actually working with and testing different options. In addition, there's also the issue of buying the right backup software."

No, the bottom line is that this whole review was a poor idea for the THG Newsletter. It's really slanted at the enterprise market. What home or even SOHO user is going to "test different options"??? Add to that the fact that removable hard drives are now much cheaper than the equivalent error-riddled tape. I caught the story in a news article lately and did some checking. Hard drives have tape backup beat in every category but the ability to survive being dropped on a concrete floor. The cost-per-gigabyte ratio isn't even cloae any more.

In the end, the review was a waste of space and time. The average user who is the target for THG newsletters is a long way from the big-business enterprise user who might be interested in owning a tape drive.

Now we come to the second issue I have with the review- the conclusion that tape backup is the way to go for long-term data backup.

I have a problem with this old fashioned idea. For one thing, unless the tapes are stored in carefully controlled atmospheric conditions, tapes won't last anywhere near as long as the equivalent data on an optical medium, such as CD-R. I have tapes that are less than 10 years old that are totally unreadable. I have FLOPPY disks older than that that are just fine.

And that supposes that you've picked the right format from a manufacturer that will be around 15 years from now to support that drive under new OS's and hasn't dropped the entire idea of tape.

The final killer is: what kind of data, outside of things like family photos, do YOU still need hanging around 10-20 years from now? Anybody?? No, I didn't think so. Remember what you were doing with computers 15 years ago? Yeah. Either wondering what the older kids were talking about or firing up that copy of Windows 95. Yuck.

Anybody still want to use your Win 95 data?

Not by much. In fact, if you use one of the new Pentel acid-free pens and acid-free paper, it's very likely that it will outlast any of the tape cartridges around today.

Look at the Declaration of Independence, and they didn't even have THAT, just goose quills and ink! Try to get tape to hold up for 230 years!

tapes are a lot more durable than you think, one very common mistake even for the brightest admin out there, is to use a slow scsi card on the tape drive. this causes the tape to have to be rewound several times incrimently durring the backup, this will litteraly shread your tape. if you regularly clean the drive and actually know what your doing they will last a looong time.

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