Re: Inexpensive archiving for tapeless media

[Bob Cole] "If one of the advantages of Cache-A is the ability to run using open source software, BUT Cache-A has gotten around the problem of backing up updates on what is essentially a linear medium of tape, by adding their own layer of software, does that mean that the "open source software advantage" is gone? Or not?"

This software is used to interact with how you get the data on to tape, and some software actually write the data to a proprietary structure. Cache-A archives are stored in such a way that other tape players will be able to read the data more easily than other solutions. With other solutions, it will be very very hard to get the data off of the tape as it is so tied to how the software writes the data to tape. I think it was mentioned earlier, but Cache-A uses a tar system, which is a pretty benign format. LTFS is different.