I don't think this has much to do with the operating system, but I'm looking for a way to back up about 50 gigs of data. That 50 gigs will eventually grow - slowly but surely.
What are my options? I'm gravitationg towards tape, but there are more types of tape than grains of sand.
Here's what I looked at:
Iomega REV: Nice, fast. Remember iomega's click of death? The realibility of those jaz drives is questionable. The media is proprietary/expensive, so are the drives.

DVD's: not enough capacity.

RAID: Nice, fast, and basically indestructable under normal circumstances. What about fires? Floods? What if the PC gets stolen?

My current workaround is to pipe all that do two other PCs, via the network. I guess something catastrophic won't happen to each PC. Two qare WIndows XP one is Mandrake, so a virus won't wipe out the Mandrake machine. Still, if there's a tornado, hurricane, flood, angry ex girlfriend with a flamethrower my data is toast.

So, if you agree that I should go with a tape drive, what kind should I get?
If you have any other suggestions, I'd be interested as to what they are.

what click of death...........I have and still use a 250 para port zip drive.............3 yrs now and NO problems whatsoever.........

I think this click of death crap was something M$/bill gates dreamed up...........I don't know anyone who ever had this
problem...........

In college, I installed 300 of the ZIP 100's. About 8 had those symptoms...
Even so, the REV is proprietary, and I'm hoping to stay away from that if possible.

Is this backup plan for a home-based system, or for your company's entire network? I'll assume it's for your own PC, and if you ask me, a cheap, easy, and effective backup plan is to simply to continue to do what you're already doing - install an extra drive into your machine and periodically copy over your data to it and/or copy it to a drive on another machine. Just as you say, it's relatively unlikely that either all three machines and/or hard drives would simultaneously fail.

Along these lines, and assuming we are talking about a home system, any issues that could destroy your PC (fires, floods, theft, angry girlfriend, etc) could just as easily also destroy your backup tapes, and therefore the only way to really protect against that scenario would be to store your tapes off-site, in a vault or safe-deposit box somewhere far away, preferably out-of-state, to avoid the very same floods, tornados, etc that afflicted your home. Realistically that's not really all that practical, and would probably be pretty expensive. Keep in mind that backup tapes have their own weaknesses and disadvantages too, and therefore should not be considered as impervious to data loss.

The real answer would depend on how valuable you consider the data in question, and what level of expense, time, and effort could be justified towards securing it. Good luck with it whatever you decide. -- J.W.

It would be for personal use, and you're right. My life would not be over if I lost that.
On the other hand my ex is awfully crazy....

Snump - just for clarity's sake, let me emphasize that making backups is a sensible, and even essential action, assuming that your personal data is of any value. If my comments came across as being "anti-backup" in any way, that's definitely not my intent. Like many things though, when it comes to setting up backup systems there are a wide range of options available, with a corresponding range of prices, and it basically comes down to a matter of how much time/energy is worth putting into it. It's a lot like stereo equipment - if you want to spend huge money on a top-of-the-line system, you can, but whether or not doing so would truly be worth it is a question mark.

Along those lines, certainly RAID and tape backups are valid solutions when it comes to backups, however, they come at added cost and effort, and generally IMO would be considered more designed for larger scale systems - I would say they'd be bigger guns than necessary for a home system, but of course that's just my opinion. What really counts here is your opinion, so if you want to explore building a heavier duty backup system, by all means, I'd encourage you to look into it. My only real point here was just that at least from what you've described, the approach you're now using of "copying to a separate disk on a different PC" sounds like a valid and appropriate way to backup your personal data. As you said, with >50G of data involved, CD's and DVD's are impractical, and you'd need to go with something with more capacity. From my own point of view, a nice 80G or 100G standalone drive on a separate machine would be a (relatively) inexpensive and effective way to confidently save your data.

In any event, good luck with it. -- J.W.

I just got a Seagate TapeStor 20 Travan 20Gb tape drive. it works great with Linux and they even include backup software (the X11 version won't work on my Debian system but the text only version works).

Thanks for your input, folks.
What happened was this.. a friend of mine said he was looking at tapes to backup his stuff... I jumped on the bandwagon and realized just how expensive to > 50GB models are. So for now, I'll just do what I'm doing and backup to other hard drives on the network.