Backup devices

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 11:13 PM +0100 6/3/02, Iain Stevenson wrote:
>Unreliability was the issue.  I bought a Travan NS20

That's your problem right there, I'm afraid.  Nobody makes a decent 
inexpensive tape drive any more.  I've heard of people having good 
luck with Travan gear, but I've also heard of way too many problems 
to trust it myself.

To get good results with tape, you have to go with a minimum of 4mm 
DAT.  But even that format has its reliability problems, and last I 
heard all the manufacturers of 4mm DAT mechanisms had decided to 
cease research on new upgrades to the format and start phasing out 
production of DAT drives in favor of other formats.

I have an Ecrix VXA-1 (custom high reliability recording method on 
8mm AME media) and it seems to be quite solid.  The drives cost 
somewhere between $500 and $1000 (forget exactly how much).  Media is 
about $80 for one 33GB tape (66GB compressed), making the media more 
costly than buying IDE hard drives.  (For that reason, and because I 
haven't been using the tape drive much, I am contemplating the switch 
to using HDs for backup; the advantages of tape don't apply to my 
situation.  If somebody wants to make me an offer on the VXA-1 drive 
I'll seriously consider selling it.)

Despite the expense, last time I surveyed the options, VXA-1 was the 
closest thing to a decent low end tape system out there.  The drives 
are expensive but not as expensive as competing formats in that size 
range, the media is large enough for many purposes, it's fast, and it 
has some innovative technologies which at least sound like they 
should solve many of the reliability problems with other low end / 
midrange tape formats.
-- 
Tim Seufert