[Coco] Possible CoCo Bulletin Board forum

[Steven Hirsch]

On Wed, 24 Dec 2008, Gene Heskett wrote:

> This is pretty much it for mailing lists for the coco.  And its one list I
> don't expire regularly.  So my corpus of email from this list goes back to
> Dec 2001, when I had to reinstall after a drive failure and wasn't able to
> recover from the crappy tape system I was using for backups then.  Now I use
> virtual tapes on a big hard drive, and that appears to be at least 100x more
> dependable than DDS2 tapes ever were.

Sorry you found out the hard way about rotary-head digital tape drives. 
My experience with both 4mm and 8mm DAT suggests you can achieve similar 
results by simply making a "backup" and throwing the tape away :-(.

If you are ever interested in a reliable tape system, pickup a DLT IV 
drive and media from eBay (dirt-cheap, generally).  These are 
stationary-head systems with very sophisticated tape handling (e.g. no 
pinch roller, no pressure rollers nor rubber of ANY kind involved).

It's seriously difficult to kill data on a DLT cartridge.  I've personally 
seen cases where tapes run over a bulk eraser were still readable!  The 
drives use read-after-write to ensure integrity and will redo any blocks 
that fail CRC (up to a limit).  The lack of read-back is a serious issue 
for the rotary-head transports which are mechanically incapable of it (at 
least AFAIK).

Steve


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