tape drives

Are tape drives really popular for back ups? I had always thought that tape drives were old technology used in like the 80s. Also aren't newer things like dvd-rws a better way to go for backups?

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Webmaster

Yes, far out most companies use tape backups.

I had always thought that tape drives were old technology used in like the 80s.

Still it's the only medium you can 'trust', the life span of a cd is just a couple of years. Also, the technology has continuesly been improved. The main advantage is (still) the capacity of a tape, you'll need a whole lot of 4.78 GB DVDs to store a backup for a medium sized company which typically has hundreds of GBs of data. Note, that the tape drives nowadays are used to backup an entire network or part of it, not just the server in which the device is installed. Popular formats are DAT (Like DV tapes size) and DLT tapes, the latter is quite bigger but it is relatively fast and store over 100 Gigs and more...

ajs1976

Tape Drives are still the standard. Although some companies are looking for alternatives. I configured FireWare800, 250 gig harddrives on a server for one of my clients. That seems to be working pretty well.

Webmaster

The primary reason not to use hard drives is that they are mechanical, hence susceptible to mechinical failures as well as electronical. Another reason is archiving, this is another reason why tapes are still popular, it is simply not wise to use the same media over and over again to archive data. If you want to use hard drives to backup the network (which allows for easy and fast restore), make sure you also backup the hard drives to tape again once in a while (i.e. per week/month/quarter).

ajs1976

That is an important point.

ajs1976

Not using one harddrive, but 5. The person switches them every day.

mynameisboring

Check out how advanced they are
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compare.aspx/tapeb_sing?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

These machines autorotate your tapes

carbunkle

wow those are impressive. Thanks for the speedy reply.