Re: Why do people buy Tape Drives for backups

In message <grchdu$m5h$2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> david <none@xxxxxxxxxx>
was claimed to have wrote:

On Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:57:28 -0700, John rearranged some electrons to say:

On Sun, 5 Apr 2009 19:23:01 -0500, "philo" <philo@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"John" <seetheplane@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:q0fit45j1hsvojtsjhk66j36v9ia6n0h9g@xxxxxxxxxx Why do people buy
tape drives for doing backups? It seems expensive, looking at the prices
at newegg.com, so what's the major advantage over, say, an external
drive? I had a Colorado Backup Tape drive that used a 250mb tape way
back when, but I hated the thing cus it was so slow and they were not
very reliable . . . I could not always recover the backup files when I
wanted them.



They are not used much on home computers...

more for servers and offices performing automated backups


Would that be because - If you do backups every day - the backup media
(the tapes) are cheeper in the long run?
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A real backup scheme has you sending rotating copies of your backups to a
different location to prevent a disaster (the building flooding, for
example) from putting your backups at risk. It's not a practical option
to send boxes of external hard drives off site.

Why not? If you ignore cost completely, you'll probably find that you
can pack more data density into hard drives then tapes (although it's
honestly been a while since I did the math)

Tapes are very likely still the best solution, both due to their price
as well as the fact that tapes are less shock-sensitive and weigh less.
.

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