27 Nov
2021
27 Nov
'21
6:30 a.m.
On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 07:23:07PM -0500, Dennis Boone wrote:
Contrast that with the write only exabyte tapes. I lost some stuff to those.
In my
experience 9 track tapes were not guaranteed to be readable after
some interval. In fact, a standard operations procedure was to copy
important tapes to new media periodically.
There are always ways in which your backups can go wrong and not be
readable, and I'm not arguing that here.
But 9 track tapes have turned out to be pretty spectacularly long-lived.
I've personally read tapes that were stored for 30+ years in
unconditioned spaces.