Leonard Erickson wrote in a message to Jack Stein:

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

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

I've lost 3, and worse, in between losing the drive itself, the tapes and
backups were the most un-reliable hardware I've ever owned.  Pretty sad for
something who's only purpose in life was to be a reliable device...

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

I figure if the chances of me needing a back-up (very remote) and a power
glitch occuring at the same time (also very remote) must be astronomical.  I
guess it'll happen tonight, since you made me say that... I'll be yelling at
you if it does, assuming I can ever get back on-line.:-)

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

We have a 60 meg tape back-up on our unix systems at work.  Never had a
problem with that thing, had the big cassets, not the little ones the home
systems have.  It was slow though, but, been running daily since 1988-1999, I
guess it still is working, haven't looked at it or the system in several years 
now.  About all they do is run my back-up every day...  We took a giant step
backwards at work, and now run MS junk-ware.

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

Yep, thats the way to do it.  Only problem is you never need a backup when you 
have backups working.  They are good insurance to make sure everything keeps
working more than anything else...

                                              Jack 
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