What happened to the Tape Backup Industry?
Hard Drives keep getting larger and larger. This makes backing up your data a little harder. I've noticed that Tape Storage companies like Onstream and Ecrix(bought by Exabyte) have reduced their marketing efforts to consumers.
Does it just make sense to purchase a larger drive now and archive data to it?
Is DVD-R for Data the next Archiving media?
Looks like Tape Drives are slowly becoming Dinosaurs unless you're talking DLT and AIT II.
Looks like I might have to justify that DVD-R purchase sooner rather than later.
Does it just make sense to purchase a larger drive now and archive data to it?
Is DVD-R for Data the next Archiving media?
Looks like Tape Drives are slowly becoming Dinosaurs unless you're talking DLT and AIT II.
Looks like I might have to justify that DVD-R purchase sooner rather than later.
Comments
- CD-R and DVD-R/DVD-RAM/DVD-RW are faster AND cheaper (and probably even more durable)
- Harddrives have not only gotten bigger, but also much cheaper, so backing up to a harddrive is definitely more attractive than a tape drive today.
especially as
- tape drives are ridiculously expensive, if they should be capable of holding reasonable amounts of data. tape media are even worse.
- tape backups are the last backups that still can't access all data almost immediately
- server side backup systems have grown more popular, as more and more computers are organized in networks
Those tape mechanisms that were popular for normal people a few years ago all had capacities around 300-1000MB. They were slow, the media was expensive and you had to backup everyting at once back and forth. CD-R and CD-RW do replace these drives 200%. Anyone else needs backup space in excess of 20GB per medium, which is simply not affordable by a private person, as both drives and media easily cost 4x the cost of a DVD-R drive.
So yes, for home use, tapes are DEAD.
G-News
I was stuck in some sort of Time Warp. I think I'll start budgeting for that DVD-R and with IDE drives as cheap as they are I'll look to add more drives as Backups.
One of the issues is that there is only one backup media, where with tape you can rotate two or three tapes, leaving you with 2 or 3 generations of backups.
Uh... what was the question again?
Tape Drives have always sucked. Once large external fast harddrives were available they died.
Ex.
Iomega's "Ditto" - took 20 min to load the tape and forever to backup.
Tapes are still the workhorse of the back-up industry. Pixar backs up to a huge tape library. Tape is a back-up medium though, not archival. There is a good reason for this. Tapes have high capacities and they have fast write speeds compared to optical drives.
Depends on what the goals of backing up your data are? Nothing is truly safe. Are you going to keep your media in a fire proof safe *rated* to protect media? Are you going to keep back-ups offsite? Are you going to back-up often? How far you willing to go? That ultimately decides how protected your data is.
Do you need longtime archival storage? That is data you won't need to touch for a while (hopefully)? Then go optical.
Do you need to back-up data on a weekly basis in case your drive fails tomorrow? Then use tape, or invest in a RAID 5 system. I wouldn't trust my data with anything less.
You should also ask yourself how much of your data really needs to be backed up? I have a 120GB drive, and if it failed tomorrow, only about 10 - 20GB would be personal information I would be unable to reinstall. So when I run my backups, I don't backup the OS, or my applications and games. That stuff is not important in the grand scheme of things, and as such, I don't need to waste time backing it up.
Pixar uses a massive tape library controlled by robots shuttling tapes between 100+ drives and tens of thousands of slots. Incremental backups are done every hour, and tapes are cycled at regular intervals to keep the media in good condition.
Anyhow, I guess whatever you can afford. Any backup method is better than none. You can find a good AIT drive fairly inexpensively. Set retrospect to backup to it every night while you're asleep. I can do a 100GB backup while I sleep with no problem to AIT. However, archiving for the long term, optical all the way.
As a home user or small office, you're talking about backups most likely not exceeding half a Terrabyte (500GB). Pixar however is most certainly shoveling whole film renders around on their tapes with various version etc totalling to enormous amouns of data, most certainly a few hundred Terrabytes.
Also their backup system most certainly costs more than your whole family has owned money and goods during the past 150 years.
G-News
1) Backing up to an IDE hard drive and trusting anything important to that is shooting yourself in the foot. Backing up to a RAID 5 array is better, and backing up to a RAID 5 array that is mirrored by another array is again even better. That's if you really are convinced you have to go the route of a hard drive for backing up.
2) Just because Fortune 500 companies use tape doesn't mean that you can't. I'm seeing lots of AIT drives selling on ebay for around a hundred dollars, or you can get a nicer one for a couple of hundred. AIT is fast, it is reliable, and it holds a lot of data. For only a couple hundred dollars (The price of an IDE drive) you can have a tape backup method in place. This is a better solution for short term weekly/monthly backups. It's going to be faster than optical as well.
You don't have to spend a fortune to get a good tape system. If you make sure to cycle your tapes properly, you'd be in excellent shape. But trusting your data to a hard drive for backup.... still, I'm just glad you're not in charge of backing up my data.
If you can get a tape drive and a sufficient amount of tapes for little money, do it, I'm not holding anyone off. But rumor has that things that get sold on ebay in masses, are getting sold for a reason. Rumor also has that owners of drives that are no longer on sale often see themselves confronted with exponentially rising media prices.
G-News
If you can't do that, I wouldn't say SCSI in X sucks. I've had no issues. Retrospect sees my tape drive fine in OS X, and I've run large SCSI JBODs with no problem under OS X. My SCSI burners, on the other hand, have been rendered useless
<strong>When I was a kid, my neighbor had a tape drive loaded with games on his C-64, tape was cool back then.
Ohhh, yea. I had one of those. The tape drives used regular audio cassettes, and you actually had to know about how far into the tape a program started. Fast-forward to that spot, type the Run command and press play... hoping you did it quick enough.
The advantage was that floppy drives cost nearly as much as the computer itself at the time, while cassettes were dirt cheap.
Sri Sai Ram Power Controls as a manufacturer of Power Transformers, Distribution Transformers, Furnace Transformers and Dry type Transformers has been part of Transformer Industry in India.
for more details
http://www.saipowercontrols.in/