The Trouble with Tapes

5 Reasons Why DVD is a Better Medium for Archiving

 

Data storage on tape media can be a frustrating experience. By using Reflector and DVD technology, you can avoid the pitfalls of tape and ensure the health of a long-term storage solution. Here are some of the problems with archiving onto tape media, and how Reflector and DVD media are a better answer:

1. Different Tape Formats Need Different Drives

The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Half-inch, eight millimeter, linear scan, helical scan, if you know data is on a tape archive written just five years ago, what are the chances you are going to be able to read it? Do you still have the original drive that was used to write the tape, and does it still work?

With so many different formats and manufacturers that have come and gone over the years, the one that produced your tape may be out of business, leaving you out of luck.

If you use DVD discs for archiving, you can be sure that you'll be able to read them on the drives of the future. The roadmap for current and future technologies, such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, all use the same size of 120 mm optical discs and feature backwards compatibility. With the widespread adoption of home CD players and DVD players, we can be assured that vendors will be making products that can read DVDs long into the foreseeable future.

2. Specialized Software Required to Read Back Tapes

Because of the lack of standardization in the tape-storage industry, even if you found your five-year-old tape drive and it still works with your computer, do you have the software that can read that data back?

Each vendor of tape drive puts on their own proprietary file system. The reason why is simple: it forces you to stay with their company and continue paying them money, since they are the only ones who can help you get your data back.

Reflector writes all data in the industry-standard UDF file system which is commonly used for all optical discs on CD, DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Windows, Mac OS-X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and virtually any modern operating system can read the data written by Reflector.

3. Tape Drive Compression is a Double-edged Sword

You may have a 50 GB tape, but tape manufacturers' claim that it holds 100 GB* of data (* with compression). That allows them to misrepresent the true capacity of their media and make it seem like it can hold more than it does. The truth is that only certain types of data compress well enough to double your capacity, and some of the most common types of data (like videos, images and audio) are already highly compressed and won't receive any benefit from compression. In fact -- compression can make these files bigger, making your advertised 100 GB tape hold less than 50 GB.

Archiving images, photos and videos to DVD with Reflector allows you to store more data on a DVD than a compressed tape of the same size.

4. Sequential Access

If you are looking to access a file from a backup tape, be prepared to wait. Because data is stored on a tape sequentially, you have to be patient as the drive fast-forwards (or rewinds) to the portion of the tape where your file is stored. With modern tapes nearly a kilometer long, you could be in for a long wait to get at your files.

Any file on optical media is nearly instantly accessible.

5. Tapes Degrade as they are Read

Each act of reading your data with a tape drive increases the risk of data loss. The magnetic read/write head of drive passes over the tape each time it is read and the quality of the tape degrades. Wear and tear occurs on the tape as it passes through the cartridge, rewinds, fast forwards, and is pulled through the tape drive. You may have seen this happen with VHS and cassette tapes, where the tapes you have watched/listened to gradually lose signal quality. As tape is a magnetically-arranged analog signal, the more it is read the more signal degradation occurs. You certainly don't want that happening to your data.

Optical media is permanently burned (in the case of DVD-R media) and does not degrade or suffer wear-and-tear as it is read back or exposed to magnetic fields.

Conclusion

Many of you who have already used tape are already familiar with these problems. This is only a short list, there are other reasons as well - most notably the cost of tape drives (well over $1,000) and tape media are significantly higher price per gigabyte than their DVD counterparts, and that tape drives require regular maintenance and cleaning.

With the widespread adoption of DVD technology, both in the home and business environment, there are many advantages of using Reflector and archiving to DVD over tape.

Check out StorageQuest Reflector Backup and Archiving Manager - burn, print labels and track archive data easily and painlessly.