[semi-OT] QIC2 streaming cartridge tape lossage

[Bill McGonigle]

>   Hard disks aren't particularly suited for this, either.  They're
> more sensitive to environmental factors than just about anything else,
> and they're not designed to be spun up only once every few years.  I
> don't have data, but I'm not sure I'd want to trust my data to a
> spindle motor that may not start because the bearings seized.

Right, that's why I cycle them through every few weeks.  If they don't
survive the scrub and SMART they get RMA'ed.  I use a safe deposit box,
and have two copies there, plus the local mirror.  I'm susceptible to a
4-drive failure or a human-error + 2-drive failure situation.  That can be
improved through budgetry and drudgery.

What makes it tough for Grandma is everything above except switching the
disks.  To Tom's point, if she has to shut down her computer, odds are she
won't do it with much frequency (the diligent are excepted).  The ideal
machine takes care of everything and blinks an angry red light if a drive
has failed, maybe even has a way of marking the drive itself as dead.

Drobo seems close, but at $600 without disks it's beyond many people's
pain tolerance.  Same for SSD (currently).

Not a big fan of the spinning rust solution, but compared with my previous
efforts (tape, CD, DVD, 5.25" floppy) it's at least preserving my data.

Online backups have lots of good features and nice pricing for small
amounts of data.  If the idea of 'archives' can be dealt away with and all
data kept on primary storage and backed up to the cloud, then that fixes
most of the problems.  Internet connection speeds and HD video have a way
of bollocksing up that equation, but for small quantities of data and
short time scales it's not bad.  Woe is he whose hard drive crashes the
day after Carbonite shutters it operation.

-Bill