>>There's a utility, TapeDisk, which allows you to use tape, partidularly DAT and DLT, as a DASD volume. I'm a long-time fan of TapeDisk, and have found literally dozens of uses for it. Try http://www.tapedisk.com for details; if you use SCSI tape, it's a very worthwhile consideration.
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>Thanks Ed, but I'm afraid I must get away from tapes for anything other than critical server backup - we are moving all our servers to a vaulted "farm" soon, and there will be no tapes or tape drives easily accessible. Some LAN personnel will be responsible for rotating the tapes (now *that's* looking for trouble :) - I will have to (or at least want to) administer everything related to servers remotely. This is what got me started on the CD-W plan - this I will keep in my locked office machine, to crank out CD archives, backups, installs, etc. Plus, a few other users with vfp can access the burned-CD DBs easily, another benefit. So, it's just a practical issue to go to CDs now...

That's a fine reasoning, and there's nothing wrong with using CD-R (I have a CD-R drive as well as a Jaz drive and an HP DDS-3 tape here); however, the sheer volume of data that can be slapped out to tape far exceeds what can be done with CD-R media - TapeDisk allows me to write ~12GB uncompressed to a single $12 DDS-3 tape, or about twice what can be written to current DVD-RAM drives, or 20x the capacity of a CD-R. TapeDisk is worth considering, especially for people who currently have a SCSI-based tape drive; TapeDisk lists for ~$150, and from my POV, the useful benefits of TapeDisk far outweigh its cost.