re-use of 8mm cartridges

[Tony Rick]

In article <5506 at brazos.Rice.edu> sol!richard at sunkist.west.sun.com (Richard Seegmiller) writes:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 71, message 5
>
>#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.  ...
> ... I have been cycling tapes now for the past 1.5 years.  ...
>
> ... Consequently I have MANY tapes that have been used as many a 15-20 times.
> ... On this system I have had two (2) backups fail, and both of them
>were media failures.  ...
>
> ...  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.

I agree with Richard's recommendation.  We have a 4/370 with a third party
Exabyte on the SCSI bus, using SUN's SCSI driver (st).  We have only been
doing backups for 6 months, and have re-used some tapes three times.  The
only failures were with new, unused tapes (two instances out of ~100
tapes).  We use Sony P6-120MP tapes.  I called Exabyte.  The person there
told me that the tapes they supply are SONY, are good (guaranteed?) for 10
years, even under re-use.  I do not know if the tapes Exabyte supplies are
the same ones I get.  Does anyone out there know? I have had no restore
failures.  When I saw the original posting I wrote a small routine that
simply reads the whole tape, expecting that media failures would be
reported, and chose some multiple use tapes at random to check.  There
were no failures reported.  Re-use 'em, I say.

Tony Rick
tonyr at tekadg.adg.tek.com
Tektronix, Inc.
Beaverton, OR.