"Rob Turk" wrote in message l.nl...
"Arthur Begun" wrote in message
om...
If you are considering a VXA tape drive from exabyte (formerly ecrix)
you should be aware of a fatal flaw. Even though ads show a tape
soaking in a cup of coffee and a claim that the data is still
recoverable, the tape header is extremely fragile. If you are doing a
backup and the computer freezes and requires a hardboot as the header
is written, there is a great chance that the scsi controller version
will wipe out the header and all of the gigs of previous backups on
the tape might as well be gone. It costs thousands to retrieve the
data, and Exabyte will do nothing but give you a list of companies
that recover lost files. After it happened to me I did a google
search and found a post from someone else who suffered the same plight
from 2001 so they have known about the problem since then.

Ehhh?!? Don't know where you get your information from, this is absolute
rubbish.

If you do a backup and your computer freezes halfway into the backup, the
session in progress will most likely not be valid. This is the case with any
backup, regardless if it's tape or CD/DVD, and regardless of the type of
tape drive you use. Backup software usually write their index to tape after
completion of the backup session. If this fails, that specific session will
most likely be invalid. Any previous sessions will be perfectly readable.

Rob (who works for Exabyte)


Here is the 2001 post from someone else who lost his VXA header:

http://www.mail-archive.com/retro-ta.../msg02723.html

In my case a hard reboot was enuf to ruin the header and effectively
the 27 gigs of backup on the tape.