[Info-vax] Modern VMS (e.g. V8.4) tape installation?

[David Froble]

Michael Kraemer wrote:
> Richard B. Gilbert schrieb:
> 
>> ISTR that most, if not all, of those "cartridge" tape drives were "high
>> maintenance".  The 8mm tapes were really high maintenance.
> 
> This is not generally true. The drives are a pita, sometimes,
> in particular the 8mm needed a lot of patience.
> The data grade media, however, are quite reliable.
> I still have bunch of them, about twenty years old,
> and the original content is still readable.
> I wonder if "modern" burnt CDs/DVDs will last that long.
> 

Now I'm impressed.  20 years and the tapes still being readable isn't a bet I'd have made.

Tapes were (in my experience) good for short term backup and such, short term being in 
months, not decades.  But now time seems to stretch out, and with old devices, and 
sometimes horrible media (you get what you pay for) and too many stories about degradation 
of the magnetic tape media, I just don't attempt to use tapes any more.

For my current usage, which is mainly personal, nightly image backups to disk, and 
periodic movement of save sets to a removable disk and storage of same elsewhere seems to 
work.

I have lost a few 50 pin SCSI disks, but restore the image save set on another disk seems 
to have worked well.  Big problem is when I run out of spare disks ....

If you're talking real long term, I don't think anything can be considered reliable.

As for the writable and re-writable CDs and DVDs, don't leave them in the sunlight ....