CompuServe Messages

Stephen, Best bets: 1) Get an an erasable optical drive. Expensive. 2) Get a Bernoulli – 90M capacity per cartridge. This may not be enough for long sequences. Advantage is good speed, on-line random access, doubles as backup device. 3) 25M floppy – limited media availability – why bother? 4) Tape backup. Fine if you want to maintain space on the hard drive to load/unload segments as needed. File by file method is best, and directory is stored @ head of tape. Problem is slow access, difficulty on some models of specifying files to be retrieved, impossibility of retrieving ANY files if bad tape transfer, media problem within a single file, or media problem in directory. While same is true of other media, tape dropout is not uncommon (ask anybody who uses audio cassettes. Tapes can also break if the BOT or EOT (beginning, end-of-tape) sensor gets dirty. 5) VCR backup. Very slow, does use redundancy. Expensive for what you get. Bad idea. Kevin Krell – Computer Support Associates