On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 10:52:37PM -0400, Robert Haeckl wrote:
> Thanks, Bill.
> I have another cold swap tray in my box and a spare HD (I think it has
> W98 on it) and I'll use that. I've heard of failures with tape drives
> but I thought they were still used widely, especially to backup
> databases on raw partitions. I may still get a cheap tape drive just to
> play with it and see for myself how unreliable it is.
>
My experience with tapes has been uneven. I still use them, but I don't
trust them. I've had too many tapes eat bytes and then be unwilling to
spit them back out properly, just when I needed the bytes. Including
under DOS and Windows. Plus tapes and drives are expensive when you get
them in the size capable of backing up modern high-capacity hard drives.
And they take a helluva long time to do a full backup on a large drive.
As I said, I do use tapes, but a better solution is to mirror your hard
drive to another hard drive for daily backups. It's very fast, and the
likelihood of both drives going down at the same time is low. Then you
can do regular tape backups for something more transportable and
permanent.
Paul
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