Lifespan of Travan Tapes

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cyber0ne

I have a Seagate Travan drive at home regularly backing up what I
consider to be very important data. Also, as I move into starting a
home business, it will be used to back up important data for that as
well.

At the moment, my supply of tapes is limited, so each week I cycle
through the same tapes for my regular backup. The script I use for
writing the backup rewinds, erases, retensions, and writes to each tape
whenever it is inserted.

Is there a downside to constant re-use and re-tensioning of these
tapes? I understand that any media has a limited lifespan, so they can
only be used so many times before losing their reliability. But how
about the retensioning? Does doing that on a weekly basis drastically
reduce the tape's long-term reliability? Should it be done monthly?
Yearly? Never?

Any advice on the matter would be much appreciated, thank you.


Regards,
David P. Donahue
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.cyber0ne.com
 
cyber0ne said:
I have a Seagate Travan drive at home regularly backing up what I
consider to be very important data. Also, as I move into starting a
home business, it will be used to back up important data for that as
well.

At the moment, my supply of tapes is limited, so each week I cycle
through the same tapes for my regular backup. The script I use for
writing the backup rewinds, erases, retensions, and writes to each tape
whenever it is inserted.

Is there a downside to constant re-use and re-tensioning of these
tapes? I understand that any media has a limited lifespan, so they can
only be used so many times before losing their reliability. But how
about the retensioning? Does doing that on a weekly basis drastically
reduce the tape's long-term reliability? Should it be done monthly?
Yearly? Never?
Click to expand...

Nothing will reduce the reliability of a Travan. Zero divided by anything
is still zero <lopsided grin>.

Don't trust a Travan for anything important. If you're going to use tape,
at the _minimum_ get a DDS drive and if you do that then replace the tapes
annually on general principle. A VXA, DLT, or LTO would be a much better,
but more expensive option.

For a small system, using hard disks in caddies as disposable media is a
viable option--don't make the mistake that many make of using just one,
best is to have 5 or more and use a different disk every day, just like you
would tape.
 
A VXA, DLT, or LTO would be a much better, but more
expensive option.
Click to expand...

Truth be told, a nice DLT is on my wish-list for business purchases,
but right now I'm just in the planning phase and don't have the capital
to purchase one (need either a nice small business grant or some good
early profits). DLT is the standard at my day job and they've never
had problems.

But, for now, I guess my specific question is whether or not a weekly
re-tension does more harm than good?


Regards,
David P. Donahue
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.cyber0ne.com
 
Previously J. Clarke said:
cyber0ne wrote:
Click to expand...
Nothing will reduce the reliability of a Travan. Zero divided by anything
is still zero <lopsided grin>.
Click to expand...
Don't trust a Travan for anything important.
Click to expand...

That matches my experience. But in the beginning the devices sometimes
fake being reliable to confuse the user! (I had 2 drives dying and
several unreadable tapes before I decided the technology was basically
a scam...)
If you're going to use tape,
at the _minimum_ get a DDS drive and if you do that then replace the tapes
annually on general principle. A VXA, DLT, or LTO would be a much better,
but more expensive option.
Click to expand...
For a small system, using hard disks in caddies as disposable media is a
viable option--don't make the mistake that many make of using just one,
best is to have 5 or more and use a different disk every day, just like you
would tape.
Click to expand...

Alternatives include a second storage server where you mirror to,
but make backups on removable media regularly.
For smaller backups MOD and DVD-RAM might be an option.

Arno
 
Arno said:
That matches my experience. But in the beginning the devices sometimes
fake being reliable to confuse the user! (I had 2 drives dying and
several unreadable tapes before I decided the technology was basically
a scam...)



Alternatives include a second storage server where you mirror to,
but make backups on removable media regularly.
Click to expand...

That's what I do on my home system. My main server is a 2K3 box with three
quarters of a terabyte on a RAID, but most of that is HD captures and other
media files that I can live without. Everything important (in the sense
that I will be in legal or financial trouble or have to duplicate
significant amounts of work if I lose it) gets copied to a Novell server
periodically and then I back up the Novell server onto DLT.
 
cyber0ne said:
Truth be told, a nice DLT is on my wish-list for business purchases,
but right now I'm just in the planning phase and don't have the capital
to purchase one (need either a nice small business grant or some good
early profits). DLT is the standard at my day job and they've never
had problems.

But, for now, I guess my specific question is whether or not a weekly
re-tension does more harm than good?
Click to expand...

Doubt it's going to make much difference either way. A little more wear on
the surface but the tape tension is also closer to being right, so it
probably works out neutral.

Do restore your tapes periodically to a subfolder to make sure that they're
actually readable and have the right content.
 
I have a Seagate Travan drive at home regularly backing up what I
consider to be very important data.
Click to expand...

Travan drives are notoriously unreliable. If your data will fit on
DVD-RAM (4.7GB), that is an excellent alternative to tape. (It's
currently my favorite for small servers and personal backup.) For
high-capacity backup, removable hard drives are probably the best bet.

Regarding your original question, I recall reading somewhere that Travan
tapes are supposed to be rated for 100 passes, but I would not count on it.
(DVD-RAM media is rated for 100,000 read/write cycles.)
 
:> I have a Seagate Travan drive at home regularly backing up what I
:> consider to be very important data.
:
:Travan drives are notoriously unreliable.

Best comment I ever heard about Travan drives:

"Of course your restore failed. It's advertised as a 'backup'
device. They never said it was a 'restore' device. Sheesh!"
 
Previously Robert Nichols said:
:> I have a Seagate Travan drive at home regularly backing up what I
:> consider to be very important data.
:
:Travan drives are notoriously unreliable.
Click to expand...
Best comment I ever heard about Travan drives:
Click to expand...
"Of course your restore failed. It's advertised as a 'backup'
device. They never said it was a 'restore' device. Sheesh!"
Click to expand...

Nice!

Arno
 
Regarding your original question, I recall reading somewhere that Travan
tapes are supposed to be rated for 100 passes, but I would not count on it.
(DVD-RAM media is rated for 100,000 read/write cycles.)
Click to expand...

The last Travan I touched was about 10 years ago. The solution to my
numerous problems from tech support was:
a) limit backup/restore jobs to 15-20 minutes or less otherwise it
overheats & the tape breaks
b) throw away a tape after 5 uses (of any kind). 3 warranty
replacements later I don't think I ever reached 10 successful uses of
any media on any drive of that model.

I'm sure progress has been made but I doubt 100 passes is realistic.
100 passes is still a very low number anyway.

I'm convinced Travan is/has been for newbs to "feel" secure for having
bought a "backup device" but then don't bother to use it. At least
that's the only way I can wrap my brain around its continued presence.
 
"Having been let down by our old tape-based backup system once to many times
I searched the internet high and low for an alternative solution. I knew
that the logical route would be a disk-to-disk backup between the server and
a remote machine, but I was concerned that transferring so much data across
the network would cause a significant drop in performance.

Over the period of several months I downloaded and tested dozens and dozens
of different backup systems, but none of them really did what I wanted;
store multiple versions of the data from days, weeks & months ago without
needing to multiply the disk space (and cost) it required! I was almost
ready to give up when I stumbled across DataMills Relative Rev Backup.

At last I had found an application that would store incremental backups as
if they were full backups... what they are in fact is virtual backups!
Genius!

I now backup all my data in less than 6 minutes, and can restore any version
of any file from an archive of backups that goes back months. It is so easy
and so reliable I can forget about it and get on with more important things.

Thanks DataMills!" -- David Hasell
 
cyber0ne said:
But, for now, I guess my specific question is whether or not a weekly
re-tension does more harm than good?
Click to expand...

Since the head is always in contact with the tape, I'd suggest it does
more harm than good due to the increased (and unnecessary) tape wear.
Note that compared to other tape media, Travan is rated only for a low
number of tape passes. I found my two Travan drives (SCSI) horrendously
unreliable.

Your instinct to go with DLT is a good one. Used 35/70GB DLT drives are
coming on the market very cheaply and they are reliable. New DLT4 tapes
can be obtained for about ukp12 (~us$18). Make sure you budget for a
new cleaning tape too, and run it at the first sign of any distress from
the drive (funny noises when loading a tape) and when the cleaning light
comes on, but don't use it on a regular basis.
 
Mike said:
Since the head is always in contact with the tape, I'd suggest it does
more harm than good due to the increased (and unnecessary) tape wear.
Note that compared to other tape media, Travan is rated only for a low
number of tape passes. I found my two Travan drives (SCSI) horrendously
unreliable.

Your instinct to go with DLT is a good one. Used 35/70GB DLT drives are
coming on the market very cheaply and they are reliable. New DLT4 tapes
can be obtained for about ukp12 (~us$18). Make sure you budget for a
new cleaning tape too, and run it at the first sign of any distress from
the drive (funny noises when loading a tape) and when the cleaning light
comes on, but don't use it on a regular basis.
Click to expand...

And resist the temptation to get used tapes off of ebay--while DLTs are good
for some unGodly number of passes (IIRC when they were trying to determine
the service life they gave up at 500,000 passes, at which time the tapes
were still _improving_) if they aren't rewound properly then you're going
to be forever fishing in your drive for the leader, and the used ones I've
gotten were almost universally not rewound properly.
 
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