Hi There,

I record live music, and have been doing so since 1974. Several years ago I
managed to transfer what I wanted to save to DDS tape, until I started
recording to Compact Flash cards in 2012. Since then I've been backing
everything up to LTO until late last month/year when my computer's power
supply failed, frying the LTO drive in the process. I have only filled up
one LTO tape in that time, and had started a second late in 2014. The
partial tape had to be sacrificed to run the diagnostics used to determine
that the LTO drive was damaged.

I know of a service that can transfer LTO tapes to other media. My research
seems to indicate that both RDX drives and LTO tapes are life-tested to last
30 years. Given that the RDX drive can be an external USB drive, and the LTO
drive has to have a computer-specific SAS or some other such card to support
it, and requires separate installation, which of these media do you think is
more archival? Just to be clear, I record on two compact flash cards, so
already have the audio files in two places when I leave the concert, and
then go home and back them up to have a third place. Do you think there's an
advantage, archivally speaking, between LTO and RDX, or is it six of one,
and half a dozen of the other? I'd like to make a purchase decision by 1-29-
16 if at all possible, so if someone could please reply soon I'd greatly
appreciate it.

Many thanks,

Jayney