In article , DoN. Nichols
wrote:

Maybe DVD is more permanent than tape, but it isn't forever.
Delamination is a problem, along with the growth of anaerobic
organisms that attack the media. I think you will be lucky to get 5
years out of DVD even if it is stored in a controlled environment.
The stuff isn't as archival as people would lead you to believe.

Agreed -- but it is quicker access than a 5GB+ 8mm tape. It is
useful for short-term backups, and save the tapes for more serious
backups. (Perhaps time to move to an Exabyte "Mammoth" tape drive, to
get 18GB+, as my disk partitions keep getting bigger. :-)

I disagree in almost every respect. I'll try to politely explain why.

First, I have had several tape breakages on my 8mm and Hi-8 tapes in
the 17 years I've been using camcorders. I have not yet had a breakage
in one of my DV tapes, but I am keeping my fingers crossed--any time a
thin Mylar tape is moving over heads, I am worried. And the innards of
my camcorders are filled with lots of gears and tension rollers and
other moving parts.

Second, none of my DVDs have gone bad. And because I might step on
them, or whatever, I usually make at least two (2) of each.

Third, a friend of mine got a tape drive backup system. From H-P, as I
recall. When it crapped out, he faced a $1000 repair bill, with few
alternatives. He ended up deciding not to replace the tape drive, and
was fortunate to have most of the files still on disk.

(By contrast, I have two laptops that can read DVDs, two desktops that
can read DVDs, and six machines or readers than can read CDs. And I
know I can go into the nearest Circuit City and buy a new DVD+-R+-RW
machine for $100. So I know that so long as my DVDs are OK, I can read
them. The same cannot be said of the several formats of tape drive that
have been sold over the past decade.)

Fourth, I routinely give or lend DVDs and CDs to my friends. The same
cannot be said of tape from various competing tape drive formats.


And -- if they would just come out with an affordable DVD writer
with a SCSI interface, I could go into that world, too. :-)



Fifth, I very, very, very happily gave up the world of SCSI when I went
to Firewire several years ago. I retired my stack of SCSI drives, from
Iomega to 80 MB to 200 MB to 1 GB to 5 GB and haven't turned them on
since (I transferred the contents to a higher capacity drive, then
started backing up onto CD-Rs and DVD-Rs). I started using SCSI in 1986
and, while it was an advance over mostly non-existent alternatives in
the PC world, it was a 15-year series of hassles over cable lengths,
terminators, ID switches, and diagnostics to track down problems.

Firewire, or the PC standard of USB 2.0, solves these problems.

(Or internal, ATA or IDE.)

I would not consider getting a SCSI DVD writer for all the tea in China.


--Tim May