[PLUG] long-term data storage

David Mandel dmandel at pdxLinux.org
Fri Feb 28 13:42:02 UTC 2003


Russell,

    Your posting brings back many fond memories of floppies and
tapes of all sorts - even paper tape.  And of projects where one
hoped to process a tape per day and the total number of data tapes
was in the hundreds.

    For the record, I still have a usable DC600 style tape drive.
As I recall, mine will handle tapes up to 250 mb, but I may be wrong.
It may be limited to 150 mb.  I don't recall for sure.

    By the way, did anyone ever use Everex software with these drives.
The software was pretty and very fast compared with Unix drivers for the
same tape drives. The Everex system looked good and a lot of people used
it.  Unfortunately, Everex obtained their speed by accepting errors.
These tapes were very reliable under most any Unix OS, but rather iffy
using Everex on DOS systems.

                                                   Dave Mandel
On 27 Feb 2003, Russell Senior wrote:

> In the early 1990s we had a set of data that originated on 360k
> floppies primarily, but that had then been heavily processed by me and
> because of their immense size (heh, on the order of 100 megabytes
> compressed) and our limited 150 meg harddisk, I had to do a shuffle
> to-from tape to do a run through it all.  We had a DC600-style
> quarter-inch cartridge tape drive that we stored it on (back in the
> archaic DOS days, before I'd found GNU).
>
> Another research group wanted to look at our data, but they couldn't
> read our QIC tapes.  All they knew about was 1/2-inch 9-track and
> something they called "square tapes", and did all their analysis on
> big-iron timesharing systems with SAS.  We shopped around for a
> service to copy the data from one to the other, and eventually spent
> about $1500 or so to make three copies of 5 9-track reels, and that
> was a deal.  Most other outfits were charging multiples of that.  The
> next time we needed to do this, we spent a little more, around $3k I
> think and _bought_ the drive.  We still have it.  The pisser is the
> damned Pertec interface card, which makes the drive almost useless to
> us.
>
> The other little anecdote about the data conversion, when the other
> group got the data, they spent _hundreds of dollars_ of computer
> center account money _just doing a frequency count_ of the data, one
> pass through.  They were amazed I was doing this on a PC, probably a
> crappy old 20MHz 80386 at the time.
>
> --
> Russell Senior         ``I've seen every kind of critter God ever made,
> seniorr at aracnet.com      and I ain't never seen a meaner, lower, more
>                          stinkin' yellow hypocrite than you!''
>                                         -- Burl Ives as Rufus Hennessy
>
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>


                                          Sincerely,
                                          David Mandel
                                          Chief Activist
                                          Portland Linux/Unix Group
                                          1440 NE 59th
                                          Portland, Oregon 97213
                                          (360) 260-2066 at work
                                          (541) 730-5285 cell

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