Our tape drive just died. It was time. It was 5 years old.
Any suggestions on the best way to archive 60 GB of Data?
A new tape drive?
Removable Hard Drives?
Other? Thanks.
Matt
Personally, I’d vote for a DLT IV tape drive…
Trinopus
IANA IS professional, but I know a lot of people who are. Every company I know of by personal contact (maybe 20) is using tape drives as the cheapest reliable method.
I bought a 120Gig drive and put it in my router/server machine. It only cost 200$, and is way faster, more convenient, and serves more machines than tape. The only downside is it’s on the other side of the room, so in case of fire/flood/theft/explosion/police raid, it won’t really help me. 
I’ve got several customers that I’ve installed removable drives for. They love em’ (fast, easy). A couple of customers have gotten two drives in removable cases and they swap them out daily in the event one drive goes bad. They use them for backups but for about $200 more you could mirror them. That’s my choice.
I bet you can probably get a couple of 80GB IDE drives that you can alternate putting into a USB or Firewire enclosure for less than the cost of a good DLT drive and the tapes, and it’ll be faster and more reliable. You can install them into a machine and mirror them instead, but then it’s harder to take them with you so you don’t lose everything if the machine gets melted in a fire.
-lv
I’m choosing removable(ATA) hard drive for my server backup because of economy, speed and simplicity. the downside is that they are a little fragile - drop it on the way back to the office the next day and your data could be irretrievable. I’m making special padded hard cases for mine.
A 120GB external firewire hard drive can be found for only $135 these days (check pricewatch.com). An 80GB external is only a little over $100.
IMHO, with prices like that, tape drives just don’t make much sense unless you’re backing up massive volumes of information. Saving data to tape takes forever. In my experience with the firewire drives, the data gets backed up nearly as fast copying a file from one drive to another on the same computer. In other words, it puts tape to shame. Plus, since they’re external, they’re quite portable.
Of course, a hard drive puts a limit on your backup rotation length. Do you now, or might you eventually, need to keep a given backup around for more than a couple weeks?
I will add that DLT tape is more durable if it is to be transported off site (always a good idea). For example, if the sys admin is fumble fingered and drops the hard drives used for backups, it’s toast. Hard drives are also vulnerable to static damage, and with more moving parts in general, more likely to fail.
Hard drives would make an excellent incremental of differential backup device, if speed and convienience was a concern.
MC$E