Re: Tape Life (was print list or User libraries)

The tape life notion goes back several years to when we switched from 
diskette backups & every time I get new media & new drive I try out different 
brand names to see which is best in terms of how long it goes before wear out 
or other problem & I was getting bad results from many different brands, so I 
asked our hardware vendor which brand name they reccommended & I asked 2nd 
opinion at IBM school ... 

I do remember one IBM engineer telling me that if I used same tape every day 
that for it to get worn out in 4 months was reasonable, but if I used same 
tape once a week for it to get worn out in 3 months was not reasonable, so 
that contributed to me switching brand names of tape media.

I do not remember now who I asked, but I did ask several people & basically 
they all were telling me that backups to tape have a life of only a few 
months ... there are two issues ... if we use some tape in our backups once a 
week, we can expect that tape to wear out in under a year,,, the other issue 
was if we take something off line so it is on tape rather than hard disk, we 
cannot expect to be able to store it for years & years like we did on 
diskettes.

This led to a change in my policies ... formerly I stored off-line the source 
code for modifications I was not currently working on & extra backups of 
modifications long term ... now I think of backups as being short term 
safety, not long term like diskettes that had life time guarantee & I 
considered life time to be far in excess of 10 years, and in fact we did have 
stuff off-line in excess of 10 years & able to restore it from diskette with 
no problem.

Given the volatiility of computer software & data this is rarely an issue 
nowadays, but long term storage of archives in a form from which we can 
reliably recover them later does concern me.

A related issue to tape life is how they should be stored ... my use of media 
goes back to the days of floppy diskettes where we had to be careful about 
stacking them vertically where a lot in a pile could crush the ones on the 
bottom.  I believe a tape cartridge should be stored so that the tape itself 
hangs over the reels the way it is read, not sagging perpendicularly to the 
movement path, but nowhere on the boxes in which they are sold in retail does 
it say anything about this side up & the various storage mediums do not have 
any such warning.  There is also what temperature they should be stored in & 
I am concerned that the retail channels are not sensitive to that either.  In 
other words were our tapes stored properly before we got them?

>  From:    sallen@fellowes.com (Allen, Stuart)

>  Also, where did you hear the comment about tape life?  And which particular
>  tape - QIC, 8mm, 3590 etc...
>  
>  Regards,
>  Stuart             
> From: ddi@datadesigninc.com (nina jones)

>  it has to be longer than that.  we're still using tapes we bought 10
>  years ago.
>  
>  but there is some truth to that.  old 9 track tapes especially.  they
>  get damp and then they get sticky, and are hard to read.  i've heard
>  they don't last much beyond 5 years, though it will also depend on how
>  it's been stored.                         

>  > -----Original Message-----
>  > From:  MacWheel99@aol.com [SMTP:MacWheel99@aol.com]
>  > 
>   <snip>
>  >  with AS/400 tapes, we are hearing that media life 
>  > span is like a few months, so that off-line storage of stuff we might 
not 
>  > need for a while, such as source code of applications not in midst of 
>  > modifications ... forget it.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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