BAD ADVICE WARNING from Kent: Access to Storage and Communication

[Ray Arachelian]

On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:

> I'm actually thinking of getting a pair of 4mm tape drives to replace
> my existing backup system (very old drives that use DC 600As; only
> .25GB / drive, pretty slow, no NT drivers; time to upgrade)

I'd keep those.  Never know what they might be worth to a computer junk
collector or museum 50 years from now.
 
> I wonder: if the data is well-encrypted, wouldn't it make the compression
> pretty ineffective?

You got it.  Compression won't happen.  But you can compress the data
before you encrypt it.  i.e.  use PKZIP or whatever to zip up your data to
a nice big zip file, encrypt the zip file with PGP or whatever, and backup
just the zip file.  (I'd do all this on an encrypted volume and set the
temp variable also to the encrypted volume so you won't have data
fragments leaking all over your drive in plain text for the spooks to
snarf up later.)

> Also: can somebody recommend good, fast 4MM drives that go inside a PC and
> work off a SCSI controller, and are supported by Windows NT and 95 with no
> special drivers? (I don't care about OS/2 and Linux support)

All the DAT drives I've seen are SCSI.  There are internal ones out there.
I'd stay away from the weird ones like HP or Sony, and get some generic
one.  Get a DDS2 drive if you can.

> [I guess I'll burn the old media or something. :-) I still have about
> 3 cubic feet of 5.25" floppies that I don't know how to discard]

Run them through a degauser several times then auction them off or
whatever.

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