-=> Quoting Jack Stein to Leonard Erickson <=-

 LE> And in fact, for safety's sake, you need a second "full"
 LE> backup tape. 

 JS> I don't believe in tape back-ups at all, unless you need off site
 JS> storage, which few home users require.  Tapes have been a horrible
 JS> mess for the home user using standard cheap tape drives, and all would
 JS> be better off purchasing another HD to do their back-ups on, and all
 JS> that is needed is a free scheduler and a decent archiver, such as RAR,
 JS> and very minimal batch writing skills. 
 LE> You alternate between them. That way if the
 LE> drive eats the tape, you still have *last week's* full
 LE> backup, which along with the incremental backups since then,
 LE> will allow you to recreate the system. 

 JS> Drives eating tapes, tapes not recording correctly, massive dust
 JS> problems, tape drives dying a quick death have been the joke of home
 JS> tape systems IMO, and experience.  I've lost 3 tape drives since 1990,
 JS> and not ONE hard drive.

I've never lost a tape drive. But I have had tapes go bad after only
moderate use (I won't buy Maxell tapes anymore!). And I've had floppies
turn out to be unreadable. 

Also, it's possible to have a power glitch in the middle of a backup,
which pretty much *ruins* ANY type of backup. And in the case of your
"use a second HD" method, you are stuck without a safety net.

I've never been interested in the tape units that attach to floppy
controllers. What I preferred back in the late 80s were the Everex
units that used what looked like normal cassettes (except for a notch
cut in the back of the case). They came in two varieties, 20 meg and 60
meg. 

That was quite adequate back then. And it took less than 5 minutes to
fill a 20 meg cassette! I couldn't believe the folks using floppy
tapes. Those things took an hour or so to move the same amount of data.
The 60 meg units were equally fast. 

There were larger units in the line two, but I never dealt with those.

 JS> Additionally, I can restore any file almost instantly
 JS> stored on a random access HD, but it takes forever to load a tape and
 JS> search for a file with serial access.   

It didn't take all that long on the Everex units. At least not as long
as you did a "file by file" backup. The tape put a directory at one end
and since it recorded at least 6 or 8 "tracks" on the tape, it only
took a short time to find the file. 

These days, I'm storing stuff I don't need only all the time on Zip
disks. And I've got the most important drive on my file server
mirrored, so everything is written on *two* drives. If one fails, I'll
get an error message on the server. But it'll keep running. 

And I'm in the process of trying to track down the backup software I
need to run an 8-gig SCSI tape unit.


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