That feeling you get when your tape drive gives you NEGATIVE compression

#1 Posted 25 January 2016 - 10:55 PM

LTO-3, 400GB native, 800GB with 2:1 compression (good luck), and I'm getting 300-320GB per cartridge with compression on.

I need less archives and installers.

This post has been edited by Person of Color: 25 January 2016 - 10:58 PM

#2 Posted 26 January 2016 - 03:57 PM

Yeah, because LTO6 drives are still just way too expensive. Most companies I work for don't even do much with Tape anymore. Just mirrored arrays, sometimes at multiple locations. A couple of them have removable HDD sets they swap out and re-mirror and keep secure though. The ones that use tape have LTO6 and it is high-capacity, but highly expensive too. A quick Google shows an LTO version 7 that in theory is out, but I have never heard of or seen one. Only seen a couple of LTO 6's.

As far as the compression, modern archive compression is pretty darn good. I used (and still have) ARJ for archiving. I still have thousands of ARJ archives. It has extra compression options which allow some seriously dense files, but in the early 90's this was REALLY processor intensive. Today, is instant of course.

I still have my old Colorado Backups... 250Meg... not sure if any still work, but I think everything is still on drives on the servers.
<end of ramble>

Good luck with your tape backups.

MrBlackCat

Tea Monster

Polymancer

#3 Posted 28 January 2016 - 04:54 AM

They still use ARJ? Ermagerd!

MrBlackCat

#4 Posted 28 January 2016 - 04:28 PM

Tea Monster, on 28 January 2016 - 04:54 AM, said:

They still use ARJ? Ermagerd!

I don't think there is any they... I am pretty sure I am the last person to use ARJ. Hehehe

MrBlackCat

Tea Monster

Polymancer

#5 Posted 30 January 2016 - 07:11 AM

LOL, it could be much worse.

I kid you not, a woman was 'hired' by our MD when I was working at a local paper as an 'IT Consultant'. This woman's primary qualification was that she was the captain of a local netball team. Her idea was to buy in a load of these hybrid magento-optical drives. Honestly, they were some of the worst things imaginable. They came in a cartridge and stored something like 300MB, which, at the time, was a fair amount of data. These things would crash more often than Malaysian airliners. They were our primary archive format and they were constantly over at the IT Dept being 'recovered'.

I remember ZIP disks as well. They were great - until the 'click of death' occured.

Person of Color

Senior Unpaid Intern at Viceland

#6 Posted 01 February 2016 - 05:23 PM

I'm pretty sure I'm not getting negative compression. I can't stream data to this drive fast enough. Getting a lot of of dummy sectors. I need a better SCSI card.