re-use of 8mm cartridges

[Richard Seegmiller]

#As I understand it, the 8mm helical-scan cartridges are not recommended
#for multiple-usages.  Do any of you in net-land have any experience in
#this area?  Do you re-use your "expired" 8mm backup tapes?  If so, have
#you noticed a problem with high error-rates?  How many times do you re-use 
#the cartridges?

I am using an Exabyte backup system on our 3/260 running 4.0.3.  The drive
is installed off a SCSI-3 host adapter.  I use Sun's device driver
supplied w/ 4.0.3 for the Exabyte.  I also use an mdump (multiple dump on
one tape) facility supplied through APUNIX.  I have been cycling tapes now
for the past 1.5 years.  This is our backup schedule

level 0:	every day.
keep each day's backup for one week
keep each week's backup for 3 months
after three months, keep one backup for each month forever

Consequently I have MANY tapes that have been used as many a 15-20 times.
I have had to do restores from these tapes and have had NO problems at
all.  On this system I have had two (2) backups fail, and both of them
were media failures.  The first failure was about 1 month after we started
using the Exabyte (it was a new Sony tape), the second failure was about
one month ago ( it was a reused Sony tape, used about 10 times).

I don't have any statistics on the error rates on the backups on used
tapes.  Yet my experience has been that we have had no failures recovering
data from our backup tapes.  My recommendation would be to reuse the
tapes.

Richard Seegmiller
Research & Techonology Development
De La Rue Printrak
1250 N. Tustin Ave.
Anaheim, CA 92807

Phone:    (714)666-2700
Internet: sol!richard at sunkist.West.Sun.COM 
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