>I have a 100MB Zip, which I just might use. If not, you being the h/w expert around these parts, what tape b/u would you recommend?
>
It depends largely on your budget and how much you have to back up. Some general rules of thumb:
(1) Buy a tape drive capable of backing up your systems to a single tape, not just now, but at least 6 months from now. Don't buy a tape drive that'll hold 4GB compressed data where you now have only 3GB used on your hard drive; if you've got a 10 or 12GB drive, think about getting a tape drive that'll hold all of it. Disk space use will expand to use every bit of space it can.
(2) Buy the fastest interface for the drive that you can afford and that can be connected to another system.
DON'T BUY A TAPE DRIVE THAT USES THE DAMNED PARALLEL PORT. It may be easy to hook up at first, but a paralel port is about as slow as you can get, is asking for problems with your printer eventually, and may well go the way of the dodo in a couple of years IAC. It's a bit less convenient to hook up an IDE interface drive, but it's better than an order of magnitude better data rate...
(3) Buy a drive that works with standard software and uses a standard tape cartridge. If you buy a drive and know it needs to work with NT, find one tht will work with NT's backup program, and Win9x's, and has support from people like Seagate for Seagate Backup and CA for ARCServe. Proprietary means that if the next version of your OS is a PITA to write a backup program for, your drive will be orphaned, guarenteed. If you can't buy generic media for the drive, count on paying lots more per backup cartridge down the road than spending an extra 20 bucks now for a similar drive that used a standard medium.
That being said, some guidelines on standards. At the low end, the standards are the Travan format drives. The TR-4 and TR-5 formats are well-supported. fairly inexpensive, and the media is available from a number of sources. The TR-4 and TR-5 drives have some degree of compatibility between drives from different vendors. If I wanted to spend < $300 for drive and tapes, this is where I'd start. I'd look at IDE, or SCSI if you already have a SCSI adapter. I'd stick with name brands like Iomega, Eagle, Tandberg, HP and such - you can get a decent 7-10GB TR-4 media internal drive with software and one tape for well under $250 without going to the no-name brand equipment. This is a market where spend an extra $20 for a name-brand drive pays handsome diviedends down the road.
The mid-tier gets into 4mm DAT and 8mm drives. This is where I go. Media is standardized. Drives from different vendors which use the same media are pretty interchangeable. SCSI is the medium of choice, and is well-supported cross platform; IDE has limited availability, and we're starting to see some FireWire implementations (IEEE-1394, a very high-speed serial interconnect capable of data rates in excess of what you can move off most IDE drives.) Tremendous ECC technologies, with several layers of multi-bit error correction in the native tape format. Tapes are cheap. The bad news - the hardware ain't cheap; count on spending over $600 on a 12-24GB drive without adapter, cables or software, perhaps in the $800-$1000 range. This is what I use at home for my LAN, and at my office, and at most client sites. Win98 has support for the them, so does NT, and WIn2K, right in the OS. I can take a tape shot on an HP and read it on a Sony that handles the same or higher revision media with the same software with no hesitation. SCSI makes external connections much more feasible than the IDE adapter. You gets what you pays for here. I buy HP DDS-2, DDS-3 and DDS-4 models now, because the damned things work consistently, but I pay an average of $100-150 more for the HP drive than an equivalent Sony, Seagate or Quantum. The Sony drives are probably the most economical; I've had such good luck with HP DATs that I spend the extra money for the HP drive.
You can sometimes find some small (4-6 cartridge) DAT libraries at bargain-basement prices from vendors like Archive who've been bought up by other vendors like Seagate. If you're certain of the warranty, they're great investments.
Beyond this, there's the high-end. DLT, SLR, and a number of other new technolguies. Many support things like UW2 SCSI (80MB/sec data rates) or fibre channel. Big bucks for the drives - $3000-12,000 is not uncommon, but you start seeing single media capable of hold better than 100GB/cartridge. High reliability and ECC capacity, multi-tape libraries and the like are available. If you need backups in excess of 100GB and can stress a 100Mbps Faster Ethernet connection, this is where to spend your hard-earned pennies. Quantum. Compaq/DEC. HP. Exabyte. Seagate. I haven't encountered any low-end product in this market range, and DLT is as standardized now as 4mm DAT. I've helped with the purchase of SLR-technolgy libraries that use fibre-channel interconnects to the servers, and have capacities in the multi-TB range. Heady stuff...nice, as long as you don't have to shell out the money from your pocket.
I'd strongly advise against selecting interchangable media drives that can't hold a full backup on one cartridge/tape as your primary system backup media. I swap in a fresh DDS-3 tape at night and know that my whole LAN gets a full backup at night. I'd hate to have to sit there and swap 100-250MB removable media disks like the SuperDisk or Zip. I like my sleep. Zip/Jaz/CD is great to back up one project. My Win98 box has a 9GB C drive, about half full. The NT Server has a RAID array, and has about 6-8GB of crud spread over several volumes. Eveything fits on one tape, so I can sleep and not worry about 'Time to change the tape.'
Removable media is a good investment - CD-R is great on an archival basis, is cheap, and yopu can get a reasonable amount of stuff (~650MB) on a $2 CD-R. Just don't plan on reusing it - it's write once. You pay a big price in removable media cost for reusability - a 1GB Jaz cartridge costs about the same as I pay for 40 CD-Rs. So I have to reuse the Jaz cartridge 40 times for backup before it becomes economical if I don't use it as primary media, and I can't go back 38 generations to see what was there - once overwritten, it's gone.
Confused yet? ;-)
