>>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.
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>That's a valid point - my full production-server backup already is around 10 GBs and growing. Fortunately my directory-groupings of DBCs are time-sequential in nature and naturally split into 300-400MB DB chunks, nice for CDs & archiving.
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>However, others may not have their data organized like this, and may require larger media, as you say. BTW, I believe DAT tapes have grown past the 12/24 size, have they not?

Yep, DDS-4 now is ~20-40GB; unfortunately, DDS-4 drives generally can read but not write on DDS-2 media, and I have a lot of 120m DDS-2 DAT tapes here, and no overwhelming danger of the cash in my wallet getting so crowded that it's likely to spontaneously combust...the DDS-3 drive here is in good shape.