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Best home tape backup drive?

M

MidiGuy

Senior member
I need something for home to do my backups. I currently need between 300 and 500 MB a day, and between 3.5 and 4.5 GB on the weekend. I've been thinking about getting a tape backup drive. Can anyone recommend one, or somewhere where I can read reviews? Or can someone possibly even recommend another backup method? CD-Rs and CD-RWs might work during the week, but not really when I do my normal backup on the weekend. I don't want to have to keep changing disks, and my backup requirements will probably go up with time.

Thanks!

-Midi
 
Why not a removable hard drive, depending on whether or not we are talking backup or archive. The biggest pain about tape is that it's a linear device and if you need to retrieve something it can take eons. Big, fast, tape setups and media can cost thousands. You can buy a ton of hard drives for that kind of money, particularly if you can use older and smaller ones than are currently the rage. I have seen moderately sized older hard drives for $20 on up. It's hard to find tape media for that price.
 
If were insistend on buying tape, I would not recommend anything besides and Ecrix VXA or a DLT drive...then again are you rich enough to spend the 5 grand..


Use a removeable drive or a CDRW which is EVEN CHEAPER.
 


<< I agree with dkozloski. Buy something like the KWI KF-101 Aluminum HDD Mobile Rack and purchase a hard drive for backups. You get far faster and more reliable backups.

Tapes are slow, low capacity and fail often. Not to mention the drives and media are pricey. >>



I also need some kind of backup for home. Backing up to CD is kind of painful. I like the idea of this hard drive mobile rack. I assume you can use any hard drive with it. You just turn off the computer, swap the drive in or out, then do you backup, right?
 
My bad...for some reason I skimmed over that part....

Yes, I agree, that police officer WAS right when I sideswipped that lady yesterday . I NEED BETTER GLASSES😉


Seriously, I also cak the idea to setup a backup drive..

Here is a VERY NICe removable rack that goes with an aluminmum case..actually it goes with any case, and has an LED to identify differnt frives if you have more than one.

Here is a nice desktop backer-upper. It was formally Veritas Backup Exec Pro, WHich was a VERY GOOD backup program...OR you could use the windows backup feauture or even Norton Ghost 7.0
 


<< I like the idea of this hard drive mobile rack. I assume you can use any hard drive with it. You just turn off the computer, swap the drive in or out, then do you backup, right? >>

Yep, any hard drive should work fine.

I use Norton Ghost ($15 if you look hard) to create partition images of my source drive on my backup drive. I run it from bootable DOS floppy. Ghost also has a clone feature that creates an exact duplicate of the source drive but I prefer images which can be password protected.
 
Get a DDS4 tape drive. Initial costs are kinda high, moreso if you don't already have a SCSI controller, but hey you can't beat 20 GB (native!) tapes for $15! The tape media is pretty damn reliable too from what I hear and even those cheap $500 Sony units comes with a 3 year warranty.

 
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