[plug] More Bad Sectors...

[Craig Ringer]

> I haven't found tape to be that reliable. It's not bad with new drives in new 
> machines, but I've used DDS2 drives (still under maintenance, and cleaned 
> regularly) which take all day to back up & restore, which have snapped tapes, 
> etc... I gave up in the end.

Weird. I've used quite a few tape drives and they've all been perfect. 
Never used anything but Sony DDS[24] drives though. The tapes do have to 
be kept in a cool place, and they don't last forever but generally its a 
  more reliable medium than CD/DVD in my experience.

> It also takes a lot of DDS2 tapes to back up a 40Gb (small by today's 
> standards) HDD... And the bigger the tape, the more expensive it is. ^_^

True :-(

We use DDS4 for our daily differential backups at work. Currently I can 
use DDS4 for the weeklies too but that won't last, we'll be on two DDS4 
tapes soon :-( . At home my DDS2 drive is enough to back up the 
important stuff, but backing up two 120gig drives is a somewhat 
nightmarish task (unless you can afford SDLT for home). I plan to go 
hardware RAID 5 and just back up the really important stuff (which is 
handily quite small). Since the contents of my drives don't change too 
fast, I can also just write stuff to tape and put the tapes in a box.

Craig