I am not sure that writable CDs are that good a long term storage media -
they may not even be as good as DDS. I thought that DDS tapes were spec'd
to be able to sit in a drawer for 10 years and still be readable (unlike old
reel to reel tapes that needed yearly re-tensioning.) You could back up
everything twice just to be safe, and re-read tapes every few years
as a test.

Also, consider the fact that a single DDS-3 tape is roughly equivalent
to 20 blank CD (12gb / 600mb = 20) and you soon find you are needing
an awful lot of blank CDs.

The newer recordable DVDs hold more promise. HP does support mag optical
discs that are supposed to have a very long term storage potential,
but the media cost is pretty high if you need to save very many files
permanently.

For data files, I find extracting them with Suprtool into CSV files and then
exporting them to a PC a useful option. If the largest file can fit on a CD,
then
just use a PC CD-ROM burner. If too big, try compressing it. Even in 50
years
a CSV file should be processable by pretty much any software, where an
HP3000 STORE
of an IMAGE data base may be darn hard to process.

With PC disc drives so cheap, a little batch job and some FTP transfers
could easily backup
an entire database to a PC and then be copied to a CD-ROM, especially if you
got one
that automatically feeds in blank CDs. We process a 25 gigabyte database
every night and send
all the data to our data warehouse in ASCII files, and this is on an old
HP977.

If you send binary data files with exact images of the dataset,
you could even rebuild the data base by just dumping all the data back in.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Madigan [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2000 11:23 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: CD Burner for the 3K
>
>
> Does HP currently support or plan to support a CD burner for
> the 3000?  We archive files to DDS tapes and would like a
> more durable medium than tape for long-term (essentially
> forever) archiving.  Thanks!!!
>
> Tom Madigan,