SillyDog701

[Antony]

Storing of those tapes is not as easy when compared to optical media.

You also need to keep the environment with low humidity, and away from magnetic field.

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[Wellander]

Hi,
There are good for backup.
Not very good for accessing bits by bits though.

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[Don_HH2K]

I remember when i still used my old SyQuest SparQ drive. I think the drive itself gave out before the cartridges did.. Of course, that could be because I was backing up by 70mb hard drive to it every few months for about three or four years.

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[900t]

Tape drives are unbearably slow (especially the ones with floppy interfaces)

Floppy disks cannot hold real files anymore (with digital camera images measuring in excess of 800ko for a jpeg, a 1.44mo disk is a little tight)

The CD-rw is the only real viable removable storage right now, and even then it sucks too (isn't so much plug&play, needs to be burnt and such).

Zip disks are about the only real good thing for normal use, but harddisks are so large and cheap nowadays for file storage, and internet connections are so fast e-mail works good for transferring files that removable media is much less required as it once was.

25 years ago was 1980 - there weren't even any PC's running around yet.

I do have 5.25" floppies still running around, but my newer NetVista won't let me install the drive...

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[minion]

Tape drives are great. I used to use
exabyte 8mm drives a lot, but the
excessive tape transport in the helical
scan design bothers me. So I'd like to
get a DLT drive, but it hasn't happened
yet. (I have a compactape drive, which
is the ancestor to DLT, but at 80 meg /
tape, it's not particularly useful
these days. Ha ha.)
The only data storage medium that's
actually reliable over hundreds of
years (machine readable that is, no
carved granite tablets!) is punched
mylar tape. (Just like paper tape,
but with a sort of metalic tape instead
of paper.) Very low density, but indestructable,
trivial to build readers, and in an
emergency you can read it with the
naked eye.

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