[Leica] Tape backup?

[spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

Richard,

To add my belated $0.10 worth. :(

Tapes has similar problems as HDDs. Unless you exercise them regularly, you 
aren't gonna to know they are broken until you need the backup.

After a couple of discussions with a friend who use to be the Linux HDD 
driver maintainer and creator of hdparms (if you know what that is, you are 
way too close to the metal :), I have abandoned RAID-5 in my NAS and gone 
with software-based RAID-1 for the simple reason that RAID-5 (and anything 
that looks or smell like RAID-5) will work less and less well as disks gets 
bigger and bigger. This applies to all NAS's including Drobo. The reason is 
a bit complicated but it comes down to the probability of a transient 
failure during the recovery phase is too high for large disks. Forget 
hardware-based RAID - same problem plus more.

If you really want to make sure your data is safe, rotate a copy (disk, 
tape, whatever) to somewhere geographically different. The keyword here is 
'rotate', i.e. You *must* reuse the storage media regularly to know when it 
has failed.

I am sticking with disks until either LTO drives come down in price or I get 
rich. :)

As for obsolescence, it's gonna to happen doesn't matter which digital 
medium you store the data. Get use to it and deal with it. If it can happen 
to the Doomsday Book and the Apollo video tapes, it's going to happen to us. 
You will have to transcribe all your data to a different generation of 
storage and S/W technology every 10-15 years.

I was at an MPEG standards meeting recently and had an interesting 
conversation with the guy from NIST who is driving the digital media 
archival storage problem. No magic solution in sight yet and not likely to 
be. It will always require work.

As Tina found out, cloud storage is wonderful unless you have lots of data 
to upload. The initial upload is always the killer. Best done via Fedex. :(

Regards,
Spencer

On Dec 15, 2012, at 19:26, Richard Man <richard at richardmanphoto.com> 
wrote:

> OK!
> 
> Thanks all for the advice on and off list.
>