what tapes for salvaged tape drive?

[elijahr]

Hello all,

I recently acquired a front loading tape drive from an 8 year old high
end business desktop PC. I want to use it for backups, but I have
never used tape storage before and don't know how to find out what
kind of tapes I need. I know this is a sequential access medium, so
my basic plan just involves dumping compressed disk images onto the
tapes. How would I go about finding the right tape for my drive?

Thank you for your time,


Elijah Rutschman

 

[Paul Rubin]

I recently acquired a front loading tape drive from an 8 year old
high end business desktop PC. ... How would I go about finding the
right tape for my drive?

It's probably not worth it, if the drive is that old. But you need to
know the make and model to get the right tapes. If you don't know the
model, maybe you could put up a photo of the drive and someone can at
least recognize its type.

The only tape drives that make sense these days are expensive ones of
recent manufacture. Otherwise, use DVD+-R/DVD-RAM, or removable hard
disks.

 

[Al Dykes]

Hello all,

I recently acquired a front loading tape drive from an 8 year old high
end business desktop PC. I want to use it for backups, but I have
never used tape storage before and don't know how to find out what
kind of tapes I need. I know this is a sequential access medium, so
my basic plan just involves dumping compressed disk images onto the
tapes. How would I go about finding the right tape for my drive?

Thank you for your time,

Post the make and model. maybe we can recommend something. If you
google for the model you will find what the tapes cost.

Frequently these tape drives came bundled with free versions software
that was expensive if bought seperatly. If that is the case, you've
got a problem.

The cheapest tape drives had the most expensive tapes. The tape
capacity by today's standards can be small.

If the drive used the IDE or Floppy (!) interface, it's on the verge
of being obsolete and won't easily connect to your next computer,
which is nice if you want to use backups for anyting but crash
recovery.

There are much more interesting ways to backup, these days, even if
the drive you've got is a decent drive. Drives die and owning one
drive and without a service contract is a PITA. A drive that isn't a
long-term standard (DAT, 8MM, etc) isn't worth using, IMO.