Path Technology

Here's the second part to this important overview: more care-and-feeding for your backup tapes and tape drives.

1. Tape Life

A good rule of thumb is to use 4mm, 8mm and Travan tapes no more than 52 times before retiring the tape from active use. Although tape manufacturers may state that their product can be used more often, we prefer to emphasize reliability.

We've said it before and we'll say it again: backups of your critical data can ensure the ongoing success of your business. Here's some care-and-feeding for your tape backup components.

Overall guide to tape and tape backup units:

Similar to the old video tape VHS vs. Beta tape wars when VCRs first hit the markets, different manufacturers support different computer DVD recordable standards.

Before mere mortals could burn their own DVDs, the DVD-ROM was the first DVD standard. It is a read-only format, where the video or data content is burned onto the DVD once using precision optical machinery at a commercial facility. This DVD type will run on any DVD-ROM-equipped device.