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  From: <davidn@rebel.net.au>
  To  : Richard Russell <richard@yellowgoanna.com>
  Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 19:14:29 +1030 (CST)

Re: Backup Technologies...

Richard,

Sitting on my shelves are a few dozen tapes of important stuff that I've
saved over the years.  This is just tapes, mind you; it doesn't include
floppies of various types.  I have Exabyte; audio cassette; QIC; DAT;
and others.  I no longer have equipment able to read any of these formats.
Invariably a backup unit fails, and the cost of replacement with like
exceeds the cost of upgrading to the latest technology; so you update.
Bing! instant obsolesence for your old backups.  Sometimes you decide you
will repair, or replace with a like unit, and then discover alignment
issues mean the media that was fine on your old unit is unreadable
on the new.  Bing! more lost data.  Floppy disks (which are totally
unsuitable for backups) are classic examples of that: you just know that
disks that you wrote on your own PC are almost certain to be unreadable on
anybody else's.  CD-R and CD-RW hold enough data that you would consider
them for backups, but they also seem to have issues when you try to read
them on a different unit than the one you wrote them with.

My latest backup strategy solves all of this.  I now use an IDE hard
drive installed into a removable caddy.  The media cost is so cheap,
particularly for large capacity units, the speed is probably the best you
will ever see, and each unit comes with integrated read/write heads so you
just know that it's going to read again, when you next need to use it.
Do the sums and you'll agree that a shelf full of high capacity hard
drives is much better than a shelf full of tapes (particularly if you
no longer have the drive to read or write those tapes).  The speed and
reliability benefits are just so much rich, thick, delicious icing on top.

David

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