Searching for a back-up solution and/or new HD

[wakeforce]

So I've been hearing about tape drives being the most reliable form of back-up, but I've never seen one IRL. SO how does it work, do you simpy buy tapes, put them inside and record as a normal recording media or is it something more complicated? Also, are they really more reliable than CDs/DVDs?

What should I look for in a tape drive, There seems to be different capacities, but shouldn't that be specified by the tape itself?

On another note, what HD is pretty big (100GB and up), reliable, and not TOO expensive? I don,t want to settle for ****, but I don't need a 500GB, 10000RPM monster.

(What about this hard drive?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822144187

I guess more cache = better, right? )

I plan on buying from newegg, as pretty much all computer stores in my area are ****. Are they reliable?

P.S. As for the tape drive, it'd be useful if it was a portable one if people want to make suggestions. I don,t have any space left in my case for a CD/tape drive.

[Midknyte]

tape drives are meant for servers, not normal backups. you need to buy the tape drive plus tapes. most drives will come with basic software, or you can use NTBackup (yuck).

you can't just access the data like a normal hard drive. the data is all serial so it would have to index the tape, the wind to the area with the data on it. this can take a LONG time.

you're probably best off looking at an external hdd instead, especially if you're talking about portability.

[wakeforce]

As for HDDs, I can go for an internal one. I was thinking about tape drives for off-site back-ups (in case of fire/flood/earthquakes/whatever). I'm simply wondering what is more stable, tapes or dvd's?

[Midknyte]

how much are you willing to spend? tape drives can be pretty expensive depending on the amount of data you need. you need to replace tape periodically, since they will get worn out over time.

how often do you need to do a backup?

it would help you described what you are doing. is this for a nightly server backup, data archives, what?

some of these reviews might help:
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/index.html

[wakeforce]

I'm willing to spend around 150$ for the HDD, more or less. As for the tape drives, it was simple curiosity, now that I'm reading more at tom's hardware website, I'm seeing it's not really convenient.

I'm using this to back-up digital pictures. I now have around 30GB, and it grows around 15GB per year, and will be growing faster and faster with time. I guess simply new HDD's are the answer. Any hard drive to reccommend? High capacity and good reliability?

[Midknyte]

Maxtor DM10s with 16mb cache

[ukulele]

I just bought a Seagate 160mb USB drive for external storage. I was impressed with the software that came with it. It not only allows for scheduald, select backups over multiple drives but it also is capable of a full system backup and restore feature that works just like ghost. Best of all it was totally automatic once you loaded the software.