I had a disk failure a couple of weeks ago, which I mentioned at the time. The data was non-critical and I had, I thought, a reasonable backup.

Just to be on the safe side, not only did I get out my copy of the backup tapes, I got the duplicate copies that I keep in a safe location a few hundred miles away.

For all my preparation, it seems that there are some problems with the tapes, including a couple which had a bad label, some duplications I hadn't appreciated at the time, and some tapes which simply didn't contain what I'd written on the outside.

The upshot is that out of the 20 tapes that made up the backup set, and over 60 that cover all the various things I backup and archive, about 10 were unreadable or badly labelled. Fortunately the combination of duplicate tapes mean that I haven't lost anything. Better still, I was able to recover the bulk of the files off the disk when it miraculously reappeared this afternoon, which made parts of the process even quicker.