[Info-vax] TK50 - this is annoying...

John Wallace johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Oct 10 14:35:23 EDT 2012


On Oct 10, 12:04 pm, Paul Sture <nos... at sture.ch> wrote:
> In article <47b4666a-ac5e-4f05-b920-91a8596b4550 at googlegroups.com>,
>
>  urbancamo <m... at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:
> > Just to add my 2 cents. Firstly, I don't disagree with anything said. I don't
> > rely on DDS any more is healthy.
>
> > However, on a slightly different tack data longevity is perhaps less of an
> > issue. I have read several DDS1/DDS2 tapes recently that were written in 1994
> > without any issues.
>
> > My usage pattern for DDS is typically to only use an individual tape a few
> > dozen times, so maybe that pattern has saved me from disaster.
>
> That's akin to my TK50 usage, though definitely more than a few dozen
> times.
>
> My problem with DDS drives was that one day out of the blue they would
> stop working or refuse to load tapes, and you needed to call an engineer
> out.  A pain in the neck but not too bad when you have a maintenance
> contract with short response times.  Pretty bad on a home system.
>
> --
> Paul Sture

I've probably said this already elsewhere... I did some work once with
some nice folk in the professional/broadcast audio business. They
needed their recording media+device to be 100% reliable in terms of
NEVER EVER losing data (digital equivalent of a studio master tape,
lose it and you're out of luck). These folk preferred not to use DDS/
DAT, even though another company in the group pioneered it. Some
flavour of magneto-optical was their working media of choice (which
will tell those in the know that this was a while back).

I had a TLZxx at home for a while, but for home/hobbyist use these
days the price and convenience of disk is such that a handful of hard
drives with everything backed up on more than one drive, with drive
usage rotated sensibly, preferably with one offsite just in case,
covers most eventualities.

Personally I'm not yet inclined to trust "the cloud" as sole backup
for things that matter. DSL is fast enough for it to be workable for
many purposes, it's more a matter of trust in the supplier. I haven't
seen reports of (eg) Dropbox losing data but I have seen multiple
reports of Gmail permanently losing data. Not ideal.



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