I am building a back up system. It's going to be a RAID-5, 4 disk, 2 TB back up monstrosity. It isn't going to be fully loaded, possibly a 1 TB when fully loaded prior to compression.

I want to be able to store a copy of the back ups to a tape/external media. Does anyone have any recommendations for such a device (USB or serial, doesn't matter)

Thanks.

USB - any external USB disk should work

as for TBUs - SCSI or SAS

I agree, external Tape drive should be some form of SCSI connection.

You then need to choose your tape formats.

Things to look at are:
* transfer rate
* Capacity
* Media Cost
* Media life
* single tape drive or Tape Library with Robots..


Some of the larger tape formats (from a data capacity perspective)

LTO4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

DLT-S4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Linear_Tape

SAIT-2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Intelligent_Tape

SLR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Linear_Recording


You might say.. But SCSI is expensive.. Those tapes you listed are outrageously priced !!!
Keep in mind. "What is your Company Data Worth ?" if you lost your server and all it's data what effect would that have on your business ?


There are other solutions for off-site backup as well.. companies that will transfer your data encrypted across the Internet to store at their facilities. for a monthly fee. The server agents work similar to rsync so they only transfer data that has changed.. and I mean literally data that has changed not files that have changed.

Of course if this is just a home system then these recommendations could be way out of line, you never specified the use for the system ...