February 17, 2008

Travan Tapes?


I have a lot of Dell Travan tapes that I use to back up data via the Veritas backup software, and have recently been receiving messages that the gangs are close to the end of their shelf life and wondered what the term life of a Dell Travan tape is as I have not been using it for the last 3-4 years. I have 5 cassettes that are used on each day, for example Monday, Tuesday, etc.

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1 comment:

backup guy said...

(From old blog's comments)
If you have had them for as long as possible they are certainly beyond the planned duration. By using each one day a week gives each cassette uses approximately 52 per year. Do a few bands that are valued at approximately 100-150 passes. Imation rate their cassettes about 2 years if used once a week. If yours are, in fact, 3-4 years that I strongly consider purchasing new tapes. Some of the new technologies DLT / LTO may have longer lives, but we take ours usually after 2 years of use. Our data is too important to trust to old recordings. So you never had these safeguards to ensure that you can restore in the event of failure? If you do not ask for trouble. There are times when you can "seem" to get a backup, but when it comes to restoring, the tapes may have been defective or perhaps your backup process / software itself was faultly. I at least try my process monthly to make sure everything is still good.

February 17, 2008 at 5:16 AM

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