Hello Lennart, Thanks for your message. My comments are inline below. Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> To: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng." <apetrie@aspetrie.net>; "GTALUG Talk" <talk@gtalug.org> Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 3:32 PM Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Advice -- Building Debian 8 PC To Replace Win XP PC;
On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 01:51:33PM -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
"Easy, fast, reliable" sounds pretty tempting to me.
<snip>
I thought all modern tape drives were SAS these days.
They are but SAS is way overkill for my purposes.
Hmm, VXA, that used to be exabyte, which was 8mm helical scan. After dealing with DDS I would never trust helical scan for my data. No way. Wears out tapes so fast and so unreliable. Well DDS was, although I guess those were 4mm tapes. It looks like VXA is better than that, but I still see it listed as "The most reliable helical scan", not "the most reliable tape format".
My experience hasn;t been so bad with DDS-4. The occasional hard read errors on verify phase of backup. A tape reformat usually fixes these. Or discard the tape and use a new one. They're inexpensive.
It's too bad LTO is rather expensive to buy a drive for.
Yes, too expensive. And LTO cartridges are too large for my liking. <snip>
My experience with USB drives is that 3.5" drives tend to fail when transported, while 2.5" drives are much more durable, but slower and of course smaller in capacity.
I'll gladly take a slower and smaller capacity 2.5" USB drive, to get durability.
Another annoyance with tape is that should your place burn down, you now have to locate another tape drive of the right type to read your backup again. That can be a hassle depending on how popular the model is. A USB drive is certainly a lot simpler that way being entirely self contained.
Very good point.
-- Len Sorensen