On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 08:54:51 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>> It's news to me that DAT was ever intended as anything other than a
>>> studio format.
>>
>> That's why it sucks so hard as a backup medium - it was only intended
>> to be used for lossy data (ie, audio), and was adapted for use for
>> backup medium.
> 
> Digital is digital. If you lose digital data, generally it utterly
> screws everything up.

You'd think so, but having seen them used in both lossy and lossless 
situations, I'll take experience over conjecture. ;)

> I too spent many years using DAT (actually DDS-4) tapes for backup. We
> had occasional problems, but nothing major.

I never had good luck with DDS-2 tapes myself.  You might recall that I 
related a story a couple years ago where I got *blamed* for data loss 
from DDS-2 DAT tapes even though I warned that the systems were telling 
me that the backups were no good (ie, they failed verification every 
night).  Then the finance server crashed and was completely unrecoverable.

I don't trust DAT tapes for backup any further can I can *comfortably* 
spit a rat.

Jim

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