[Leica] Tape back up for photographers

[spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

John, (& Dennis),

Suppose you are a working pro like Tina, Leo or Ted, or..., and you have a 
gazillion digital photos, what would you buy for tape backups? Assume that 
it has to work with a PC and a Mac, though not at the same time.

How reliable are these tapes? How frequently do they have to be replaced? 
How often do the content have to checked? What S/W should they use? Is there 
a recommended backup schedule?

I've came across cases where the tape drive was flakey and the tape was 
blank. I also seen tape drive s/w that generates hundreds of (transient?) 
errors when I worked for a small company and we used tapes for backups.

More fodder for the wiki but I think this is useful information to capture 
because once one data needs exceed 2TB, commodity NASes becomes a bit of a 
dead end. Even my home brew NAS becomes less useful once it gets to >3TB. 
Having a stack of NASes is no better than a stack of external disks (or a 
very large stack of DVD-R).

Regards,
Spencer

On Mar 24, 2010, at 12:52, John Nebel wrote:
[...]
> Relevant to the LUG:  Given the high value of photographic images, and low 
> cost of media and a PC internal tape drive, tape archiving is 
> cost-effective.  There can be many backup copies and tapes may be kept in 
> multiple locations.
> 
> Disk redundancy is essential, but one must do both.