Ian Stirling wrote:

On line is not needed - as long as readers remain available, and you run
thourough data integrity tests every so often.

The last bit being key! Nearly got caught out myself like that a while
ago. One of the OnStream tape drives we were using started playing up at
an awkward time. My business partner was using his to do daily
incrementals on his development platform, during a spell working up to a
big delivery to a tight deadline. I said "no need to worry right now -
you can use mine, I can live without it for a couple of weeks". That is
when we found that my one was dead as well and OnStream had gone tits
up! Just as well I did not need to restore anything from backup at that
moment



--
Cheers,

John.

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