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Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage

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On 2014-05-05, Dan.Espen <despen@verizon.net> wrote:

>
> Tape is probably not for personal use, certainly not these monster tapes.
>
> A tape holding 185TB is probably going to be writing that data pretty
> damn fast.

Yep, and you need fast hardware to keep the tape working at full speed.

> I haven't intentionally used a tape in years, but you back up
> transaction data and father/grandfather/son.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme
>
> The 3 level backup scheme works.  I once saw the primary backup
> fail and had to work with operations to go back a generation,
> re-run the transactions, etc.  We'd never tested it before and
> there were a lot of doomsayers, but it worked.  This wasn't tape
> though it was those 8 inch diskettes in a magazine.
> (IBM System 34.)

I see from Wiki that the System 34 was marketed from 1977 to 1984.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System/34>

Yes, prior to 1979 I did use the father/grandfather/son scheme and it
worked fine for production data.  Where it proved insufficient was with our
sources disk pack which got corrupted but we didn't realise until the damage
had been propagated to all backups.

We got a tape drive shortly after that and with the price of blank tapes
it was a no brainer to move to something like this:

* daily - 5 tape sets
* weekly - 5 tape sets
* monthly - 3 tape sets
* quarterly - 4 tape sets

(sets because our system wouldn't fit on one tape)

All backups except the dailies were full disk images, the dailies were
incremental backups which minimised the downtime required for backups,
and made recovery of the occasional file pretty fast too.

-- 
Paul Sture

The final step of #heartbleed recovery is to call your mother, and advise
her to change her maiden name                                  -- @gojomo

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Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-05-04 21:38 +0000
  Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-05-05 09:54 +0000
    Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-05-05 11:35 +0000
      Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-05-05 11:44 +0000
        Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage despen@verizon.net (Dan.Espen) - 2014-05-05 09:14 -0400
          Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-05-05 21:20 +0000
            Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-05-07 07:09 +0000
              Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-10 16:28 +0200
          Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-10 16:22 +0200
        Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-10 16:00 +0200
        Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-05-11 16:12 +0000
    Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-10 15:52 +0200
      Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-05-11 16:14 +0000
        Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Johny B Good <johnny-b-good@invalid.ntlworld.com> - 2014-05-11 18:29 +0100
  Re: Sony's massive engineering improvement in tape storage Whiskers <catwheezel@operamail.com> - 2014-05-05 15:22 +0100

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