| There are a number of different media
options for backing up your data. They range from very low capacity
floppy disks to very high capacity tape drives. Streaming magnetic
tape is the most common media for backing up large amounts of data.
Tape drives are sequential recording devices which means that the data
is laid down in a stream of bits from one end to the other as the tape
passes the magnetic read/write heads. To locate a specific file on a
tape, it must be rewound or advanced to the location where the file was
recorded. This can take several minutes depending on the speed of the
drive and where the file is located. In spite of this, modern tape
drives will continue to be widely used since they are efficient, cost
effective, and a proven backup solution. Today's new technology tape
drives are small, very fast and have very large recording capacities.
The cost per megabyte for tape backup is the lowest of any recording
media. A single tape about the size of a video cassette can record
over 100GB (Gigabytes or billion bytes) of data with compression.
Autoloader systems with multiple tapes can exceed that significantly.
|
|