Yes this is a bit just for fun but... is this a viable alternative to LTO and DLT for Archival MXF storage? What is you transfered to a 184 DVCAM tape or so on?
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Re: firewire tape backup hack? by Noah Kadner on Mar 17, 2006 at 7:03:01 pm
Depends on your definition of viable. With the much smaller track pitch of DV and it's not being designed originally for this application I suspect error rates and data loss will be much higher than with DLT or LTO archives.
Re: firewire tape backup hack? by Barry Green on Mar 18, 2006 at 1:51:35 am
It's interesting technology from a programmer's perspective, but as a practical system? No way. DV tape is for video, and the hardware has built-in error correction if there's a fault. Well, that error correction may help mask errors in video data, but it'd be disastrous in data data.
The only prayer you'd have of making a successful backup would be to back up twice on the same tape. That drops your effective data size to around six GB per tape. Which would you rather do: spend an hour to back up 6GB of data on a $5 tape, or spend 10 minutes backup up 4.7GB of data on a 50-cent DVD-R? No matter how you slice it, backing up to DV tape is extremely expensive and slow and inherently unreliable, because the deck was never designed for that job.
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