richard@sunkist.west.sun.com (Richard Seegmiller) (03/06/90)
Original-posting-by: sol!richard@sunkist.west.sun.com (Richard Seegmiller) Original-subject: Re: re-use of 8mm cartridges Reposted-by: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) #As I understand it, the 8mm helical-scan cartridges are not recommended #for multiple-usages. Do any of you in net-land have any experience in #this area? Do you re-use your "expired" 8mm backup tapes? If so, have #you noticed a problem with high error-rates? How many times do you re-use #the cartridges? I am using an Exabyte backup system on our 3/260 running 4.0.3. The drive is installed off a SCSI-3 host adapter. I use Sun's device driver supplied w/ 4.0.3 for the Exabyte. I also use an mdump (multiple dump on one tape) facility supplied through APUNIX. I have been cycling tapes now for the past 1.5 years. This is our backup schedule level 0: every day. keep each day's backup for one week keep each week's backup for 3 months after three months, keep one backup for each month forever Consequently I have MANY tapes that have been used as many a 15-20 times. I have had to do restores from these tapes and have had NO problems at all. On this system I have had two (2) backups fail, and both of them were media failures. The first failure was about 1 month after we started using the Exabyte (it was a new Sony tape), the second failure was about one month ago ( it was a reused Sony tape, used about 10 times). I don't have any statistics on the error rates on the backups on used tapes. Yet my experience has been that we have had no failures recovering data from our backup tapes. My recommendation would be to reuse the tapes. Richard Seegmiller Research & Techonology Development De La Rue Printrak 1250 N. Tustin Ave. Anaheim, CA 92807 Phone: (714)666-2700 Internet: sol!richard@sunkist.West.Sun.COM sol!richard%sunkist.West@Sun.COM (for hosts table hosts) UUCP: ...!sun!sunkist!sol!richard