Reliability Exabyte tapes

[Kral]

In article <1991Feb27.191216.5859 at sobeco.com> sdesmara at sobeco.com (s.desmarais) writes:
>Speaking of reliability, I'd like to know what is the reliability and the
>durability of the exabyte media.  What will happen in 15 years when I want
>to restore files from exabytes? (Recently, we restored a 14 years old file
>from a 9-track tape.)

My advice: you should always "check" any wound, streaming magnetic media at
least every 24 months.  By this I mean at least rewinding the tape, but
possibly rewriting it as well.  Otherwise, you stand the chance of the data
bleeding onto the next layer of tape and causing parity problems.

Yes, I've recovered data off of 7 year old 9 track tapes.  I've also had
unrecoverable parity errors on 2 year old tape.  I suspect the 8mm media hasn't
been around long enough to establish any kind of track record, so we play it
safe and plan on rewriting tapes every 24 months.

-- 
kral * 408/647-6112 *               ...!uunet!drivax!braun * braun at dri.com
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