>>Removable media is a good investment - CD-R is great on an archival basis, is cheap, and you 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.
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>>Confused yet? ;-)
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>No, an excellent summary and quite readable. The last paragraph makes a particulary good point. I back up my main project nightly onto an Iomega Zip disk (one for each day of the week). That's about 250 MB on my HD compressed into 98 MB on my Zip disks. It's a good, reliable system and I've gone back for earlier versions of files many times. I can usually get back 2 to 3 weeks if I need to because of skipped nights.
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>But that the limit of how far back I can go. With CD-R I could backup 6 times as much (or 2-3 times as much as the newest Zip disks) and I could go back as far as I wanted to.
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>BTW, I assume I can use PKZIP/WINZIP compression onto a CD-R just as I do with a Zip disk. That would backup up to 2 gigs of data.
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>Peter Robinson

I've recently purchased an ORB drive from Castlewood. It stores 2.2GB on a cartridge ($30 each). Drive is available in all flavors, too! (IDE, SCSI, Parallel Port, about $200 each). So since 2.2GB is equivalent to 22 100MB ZIP disks, there's a HUGE savings in cost, approximately $220 to $30 on media for equivalent capacity. It does lack the installed base for interchangeability, but that may change in time. Since it's for my own archival/backup purposes, that's not the most important aspect right now.