In my experience, DLT wasn't a very good way to do backups. Maybe it was just the drive brand we had, but we had to send about 8 drives back to the manufacturer for repairs. Many times with one of our backup tapes still stuck in it.
Several times I saw the tape catch miss the tape and get pulled inside without the tape. After that it was back to the manufacturer for repairs.
It just seems very easy for the DLT mechanism to fail which will either leave you with an unusable tape (broken catch), or worse a broken drive.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, DLT wasn't a very good way to do backups. Maybe it was just the drive brand we had, but we had to send about 8 drives back to the manufacturer for repairs. Many times with one of our backup tapes still stuck in it.
Several times I saw the tape catch miss the tape and get pulled inside without the tape. After that it was back to the manufacturer for repairs.
It just seems very easy for the DLT mechanism to fail which will either leave you with an unusable tape (broken catch), or worse a broken drive.