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

[Paul Sture]

In article 
<2383fac5-e7af-4aa9-8057-ddef314900de at r9g2000vbf.googlegroups.com>,
 John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> 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.
> >
> 
> 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 did a bit of work in the early 90s with magneto-optical gear for a 
document scanning and archival system.  Unfortunately my manager 
couldn't resist substituting the recommended PC with a cheaper (but hey 
it had a much faster CPU!) and it was downright unreliable.

> 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.

Even when disk drive prices went stupidly expensive last year, USB 
drives were still available in local department stores at reasonable 
prices.  What I didn't realise at the time is that if you are prepared 
to void your warranty (or wait until it expires) you can split these 
open and find a SATA disk inside.

Very handy for offsite purposes are the small USB-powered disks.  
However they are not as robust as the larger ones which have a separate 
power supply.  My first one failed within its 2 year warranty.  Its 
replacement is a USB 3.0 capable device, but neither a Mac mini nor the 
front USB sockets on one PC have the oomph to power it on.

> 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.

I had an interesting experience with SpiderOak recently.  Deleting some 
files permanently sent it into some kind of loop (this behaviour was 
described as being fixed in that release, but was obviously still 
present).  I deleted the account when I heard nothing in response to my 
problem ticket, and they came back to me with an offer of more free 
space.  They are normally very helpful, but my ticket had been elevated 
then fallen through a crack in the system somehow.  This highlighted how 
vulnerable you can be to external services, even where up to that point 
they have given excellent service.

For email I use the service which came with a website hosting package, 
and back the lot up, including database dumps, to one or more local 
systems on a daily basis.  While the ISP claims that in the event of a 
disaster they will make every effort to recover your data, I don't see 
why I should leave that to chance.  Initially they also offered a 
chargeable recovery service to cover you accidentally deleting or 
corrupting all your data, but I was determined not to put myself in the 
position of having to use that.

I deliberately picked a local company so that if things go sour I have 
local law on my side.

-- 
Paul Sture