On 1/4/08 6:22 PM, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
How well do tapes written with one drive read on another?
Good, provide you use serious designed tape drives. > Presuably, drives don't last for 30 years. ..
How robust are the drives? How well do they age?
It's difficult to speak for other makings but Exabyte always made it's newer generation drives read compatible with older generations. Most drives are in production for say 5 years, so the first 10 years are more or less covered.
We are paid by a Dutch police department to keep 2 different generations of tape readable by unsupported Exabyte drives. We do so by carefully storing the last new drives we could buy and using a few other drives each month for backup operations and storing and not touching a few other good ones from different production series for spare parts.
We are nearing 20 years of reliable reading tapes without any problem. I don't foresee problems for the next 5 years.
+++chefren
