Re: [TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte

Our problem wasn’t so much that the Exabyte tapes would go bad as the drives themselves would keel over on a regular basis. It’s pretty much what drove us away from them. The intelligence community did a lot of studies on archival storage devices. The fundamental truth was to keep refreshed in the online domain rather than spending ages on static media. From: TUHS &lt;tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org&gt; On Behalf Of John P. Linderman Sent: Monday, November 25, 2019 4:08 PM To: Arthur Krewat &lt;krewat(a)kilonet.net&gt; Cc: The Unix Heritage Society &lt;tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org&gt; Subject: Re: [TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte I'm not an expert on mag tapes, but it makes sense to me that 9-track tapes, where the tracks "line up" when the tape is wound onto a reel, suffer more "print-through" than helical scan tapes, where tracks are not aligned with those under them on a reel. I recall a suggestion that 9-track tapes should be mounted and rewound once in a while, to reduce print-through. We used Exabytes for disk backups for years, back when tape capacity exceeded disk capacity. I doubt I'll see that again, but, as noted I'm not an expert on mag tapes. On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 1:35 PM Arthur Krewat &lt;krewat(a)kilonet.net <mailto:krewat@kilonet.net> > wrote: On 11/25/2019 12:45 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: The Exabyte 5GB and up stuff was pretty good. LTOs, after having worked with them for the past 13 years, I can definitely say, are quit awesome. DLT tapes and especially robots, well, it took HP about 5 years to get the firmware right for a certain robot, the model of which, I don't recall ... art k.