[Coco] Sigh of relief, refresh your floppies!

[Steven Hirsch]

On Sat, 27 Mar 2010, Gene Heskett wrote:

>>> Yeah I fought with a dds2 changer for a couple of years, wearing out 4
>>> of them before I got schmardt.  Now I use vtapes on a terrabyte hard
>>> drive, very dependable in comparison to the dds2 tapes.  My data outgrew
>>> them anyway.
>>
>> At the risk of appearing naive... vtape?  What's dat?

> Actually, individual directories on a hard drive partition in this case.
> That makes each backup file into random access, so you don't have to read
> the whole tape to find file #21 on it.  V is for virtual in this case.

Heh.  Ok, I see.  FWIW: The modified version of tar that I use to backup 
my server supports random block access.  I can retrieve any individual 
file on a 400GB backup tape in less than a minute.

I'm finding a lot of folks prefer using hard disks, but I just cannot 
bring myself to trust them for archival purposes after the number that 
have dropped dead on me.



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