Tracy,
Being somewhat in the hardware business too after all these years the most common failure I encountered (if not the only) is losing of an HDD. Sometimes we can recover from it replacing the HDD's controller and sometimes can't. RAID practically defends against HDD failures if we're not talking about extreme cases like a fire, earthquake etc where you lose physically the box itself. For the corruption part naturally it'd carry on the corruption (but might not as there is a timing issue). But what I mean is to get the backup live on another part of the same disk array or even on to another backup disk. Doing that way I haven't lost a single file yet (provided I did the backup:).
Tape drives had been the most problematic for us too. We're not free on resources so we generally prefer the CD writing and up to date CDs are performing much better than tapes. Where we could do it we do backing up to other disks on other boxes and even we're doing that over the wire it's the best.
PS: Saying backup I don't mean BKF files but simple copy or zip and copy.
Cetin

>RAID is that it is ideally suited for hardware failures. The problem with it is that anything that gets corrupted live is corrupted immediately everywhere it is stored. A separate non-live backup is ALWAYS a good idea so there is a previous image of your data somewhere to go back to if necessary. Don't get me wrong, we require RAID 5 on all of our servers but we also require a separate physical backup device for daily images.
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>>>What recommendation would anyone have for a backup system to a window 2000 server. Currently have old tape drive which relies on an employee to make sure it runs each night and changes tape. Client just found the need to use the backup files and they found the backup wasn't working properly so they couldn't get the archived files back. He wants a recommendation as to a good backup system either tape disk etc. Money doesn't seem to be an option at this point.
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>>>Any suggestion appreciated.
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>>>Thanks
>>>Gaylen
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>>I'd use another harddisk. There are tapedrives, CDwriters,DVDwriters etc as backup options but up to date for me HDD has been the best medium. If money is no problem they might simply get multiple HDDs and create an hardware or software RAID (say win2K's level 5).
>>Cetin