Stephen Hilton wrote:
Chuck Swiger wrote:
[ ... ]
Sure. But a single spare HD is a single point of failure. Having one tape per week or per month going back 10 or 100 tapes gives much more redundancy....

But were the tapes all generated by the same tape-drive? if so it is
once again a potential single point of failure. The created tapes
may not be readable by any other drive due to mis-alignment etc...
if that tape drive fails, the data on the tapes is lost also.

It is true that tape alignment problems can make tapes unreadable, but the frequency of that sort of problem varies a lot by format: helical scan tapes such as DAT tend to have a lot more problems then linear formats like DLT or LTO/Ultrium.

It is also a lot more likely that a data recovery company can make something out of a backup tape written by a misaligned drive than what you usually get from a blown hard drive. People design tapes, tape drives, and the on-media data format against the common sources of tape read errors, in part by using ECC prudently (again, the quality here can vary by format, and by the backup software being used).

--
-Chuck

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