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I know that there are tape backup systems available. I do not know how they work.
Can I use an audio tape recorder and audio tapes (like the 60/90 minute kind) and backup data somehow? (Pardon my n00bness, I've never done tape backups before.)
J Diggs
Posted 2013-03-03T15:45:51.993
Reputation: 51
3
You can and that was very common in the 80th: Datasette (Wikipedia), but nowadays you won't be satisfied with a storage capacity in the order of 1MB. For a review of modern Tape Storage format, also see Wikipedia.
mpy
Posted 2013-03-03T15:45:51.993
Reputation: 20 866
Holy crap! An Audiocassette might store 1Mb of data. I remember those days. I don't remember anything resembling that capacity. Though, I guess materials must have improved a lot since then. – killermist – 2013-03-03T23:26:16.437
@killermist: I wrote "in the order of" ;) According to cited article "Datasettes could typically store about 100 kByte per 30 minute side. The use of turbo tape and other fast loaders increased this number to roughly 1000 kByte." – mpy – 2013-03-04T10:26:58.340
Not related to the topic by much, but I remember a "high speed poke" that could be done to bump the CPU speed on the COCO2. With it, you could write faster... but FAR less reliably. And if you were able to read (at all), you could only read it back again at high speed, low speed wouldn't recognize the data at all. – killermist – 2013-03-04T18:03:36.680
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Noooooo!!!
When I was starting out on my first computers back in the 1980's this is exactly what we did.
But programs were around 16-32 kB at the very most - yes that's kilo not even mega, certainly not giga!!
And, the backups failed to restore as often as not.
And, it took AGES to both backup and restore.
These days, disk space is very cheap and even Internet based storage is fairly cheap. So use those for backups. Keep at least 2 backups of all data and they must be both automatic and located in at least 2 different locations. Don't keep all backups onsite - fire, theft, etc. will see you loose all of your backups.
Personally, I have one backup to another machine locally in the house and a second to servers in the US (I'm in the UK). Oh, backups of data should also be locally encrypted as well. For reference, I use a tool called CrashPlan.
Great question though, welcome to SuperUser.
Julian Knight
Posted 2013-03-03T15:45:51.993
Reputation: 13 389
You're lucky. Audiocassette tape was what we stored data on before we could afford 5.25" disk drives. – killermist – 2013-03-03T23:23:50.793
I'm also looking into this for fun. Just speculating: probably using 56K baud modems to help could get over 18MB per channel per side on a 90 minute tape, resulting in over 72MB on a 90 minute tape. 48MB on a 60 minute tape. Two synchronized modems, one per channel (left and right), might be the ideal solution not to play/record the whole tape twice. Already implemented solutions like what I described, I haven't yet found. – Pedro Palhoto – 2014-08-16T01:23:53.013
BTW, since audio tapes have a higher frequency range (20-20000Hz) than phone lines (300-3000Hz), developing a better encoding scheme than 56K should be possible, hence increasing overall data storage beyond 100MB on a regular compact cassette. – Pedro Palhoto – 2014-08-17T12:53:57.983
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It might be possible – old PCs like C64 used audio tapes as primary storage mechanism – but I doubt it's possible to reliably store large amounts of data on a medium designed for audio.
– user1686 – 2013-03-03T15:49:42.367@grawity: You were faster, but same Link ;) – mpy – 2013-03-03T15:55:06.150
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Also in early 90s there was a popular tape backup system for PC using home VCR - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid 3hr tape would hold about 2Gb of uncomressed data.
– Alex P. – 2013-03-03T16:11:36.913Its my understanding Windows 7 does not support this tape backups. So even if this were possible the operating system your using wouldn't support it. – Ramhound – 2013-03-03T17:43:41.397
3Eeew! just eeew! Shades O' Radio Shack TRS-80. Low quality, unreliable storage for a negligible amount of data, not worth even considering in this day and age. Yes, I've been there, no need to revisit it except for historical interest. There's a reason we moved to floppy disks and QIC tapes. Let's resurrect the old analog phone modem where you dropped the handset into the cradle. 300 baud anyone? – Fiasco Labs – 2013-03-03T17:57:36.380
ATTN people - I had old tapes lying around - this was meant to be kinda for fun, just interesting to see if it'd actually work. thanks – J Diggs – 2013-03-05T22:59:14.027