XenData’s storage Jurassic Park: PC tape backup is BAAAAACK Back in the old days, those dim and distant ones before the millennium, before the '90s even, you could backup your PC to external tape drives. It was a nightmare mix of weird software and slow transfer speeds ... and then external disks came along to rescue us. Now XenData is bringing PC tape backup back, with USB-connect …
Since this is being shown at BVE it seems this is aimed at the video/film post production market where there is a definite need for off-line storage.
A good alternative in terms of keeping track of cartridge content is Yoyotta. A UK product, it can be used with any LTFS capable drive as well as several of the smaller libraries. I look after several instances of this at my place of work.
This actually makes a lot of sense for offline storage, but only in certain situations. I have been working with someone looking at getting into 4K RAW video production which means you're looking at data rates of 250MB/s. When you're talking about filling a £250 6TB hard drive with four hours of processed video, being able to move them to LTO6 tapes costing £30 each makes sense, even given the cost of the drive.
For those of us that aren't producing 4K RAW videos on the other hand, I see little benefit of using this for "personal" storage over a bunch of external SSDs.
...before the '90s even, you could backup your PC to external tape drives. It was a nightmare mix of weird software and slow transfer speeds ... and then external disks came along to rescue us.
Really? I don't remember that. Most 80s PCs could have been backed up to a single floppy using DOS commands. Those that did have a "Winchester" could use Windows Backup (bundled with 3.1 IIRC) out to a floppy or DAT tape. It worked for me.
As for external drives, those didn't reach the domestic marked until after USB was released in 1998. Before that they were SCSI, and restricted to wealthy corporations.
In the late 90's, QIC-based tape drives were actually within reach in the consumer sphere. I once had a Travan TR-3 drive from a brand called Eagle. For their day, they could hold a decent amount of data, and some clever folks found ways to extend the capacity with oversized cartridges. Shame tape niched into pretty much an enterprise-only affair (which this new device does nothing to fix).
"As for external drives, those didn't reach the domestic marked until after USB was released in 1998. Before that they were SCSI, and restricted to wealthy corporations."
Ah... USB 1.0 (which was nearly unusable) was released to a (yawning) public in 1996. USB 1.1 (slightly less unusable) was released in 1998. You may be thinking of USB 1.1.
And I was using an external SCSI drive on a Mac Plus in 1985. I'm neither wealthy nor a corporation, and at the time the combination of a Mac Plus, 4 MB RAM, two floppies (one internal, one external) and a 40 MB external SCSI drive cost rather less than an IBM PC-AT with two floppies (one 5.25" DSHD and one 3.5" DSDD) and a 20 MB internal drive. I had both. (There may be a reason why I'm not wealthy.) The last Mac to have SCSI was the beige G3; I still have one sitting on a shelf, occasionally used for its floppy drive. The beige's successor, the blue-and-white G3, had FireWire, but didn't have a floppy. My old beige has an aftermarket high-end SCSI card as well as its external SCSI port (internally it used ATA for the hard drive) and an aftermarket FireWire/USB 2 combo card. One of the things I used it for was to copy the data off SCSI drives onto FireWire or USB 2 drives.
There were a few prior to the advent of USB that used a parallel port. But the drives themselves were still more expensive than the average user usually wanted to spend. They usually stuck to floppy disks.
For the more adventurous souls, the hardware to let you back up to audio cassette was relatively cheap and/or easy to build. You can reliably get about 2MB on a 90 minute tape that way. Which was about the same as the highest capacity floppy drives, but audio tapes were much, much cheaper.
I mean tape drives need a continuous stream of data since they write it to tape while they get it. Those drives were not meant to be a block storage medium.
Now with USB bus resets are very common and in such a case you have multiple seconds of no data. Assuming the software can cope with this, how does the data deal with it. Will you have large chunk of unused tape? Will it rewind and try to "edit in" from the position it left of like a VTR?
How did CD-R drives cope with finicky and slow (in the early days) spinning rust? Many turned to internal buffers to provide a cushion against slow spots. I'm sure a USB tape drive can pack a few megs of RAM as a buffer.
In my experience, most of them coped by producing drink coasters and (sometimes dangerous!) frisbees...
In my experience, most of them coped by producing drink coasters and (sometimes dangerous!) frisbees...
After what you mentioned became a perennial complaint, drives started coming with internal buffers capable of holding a few seconds worth of burn. They also came up with techniques like BURN-Proof to help cope with recovering gracefully from an interruption.
My larger concern is mechanical alignment of the tape to the read.write head (s). Even the 60s 9 track tapes needed some alignment. Prior to the QIC standard, it was quite expensive to get mechanical alignment (early Betamax and VHS machines we're 2 kilobicks).
It should be handy for 4k+ HD video. And if you don't rotate your tape stock, archive data may become bye-bye data, mechanical wear, no read.
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