Tape Backup

dual layer dvd can store about 8.5gb of data, but now blu ray is on the scene it can handle 25gb on a single layer and upto 50gb on dual layers.

blu ray (bd) is not a cheap option though !!!!!

Never used a tape drive, so can't help there.
 
Tape is slow and Slow and very expensive.

blue ray is an option, buy from US will keep prices down

The price of hard drives are cheap, Id suggest a rationalisation of what you have and then maybe sell off some smaller ones etc and get larger storage for the backup.
 
a blue ray compatible burner and some blue ray dvds I guess. The burners arent cheap though :(
 
Anyone know what the life exepctancy of a blue ray disc is? I know DVD r/w's arnt brillient for long term stuff...

For short term storage i just backup to my fileserver at home.. then after a month its burned off to dvd for quick access and to free up space and another copy archived to tape which the parents then keep for me :)
 
I have a tape drive in the loft, very very slow and each tape only holds about 3 GB, but that was a lot of room back in the day
 
I'd recommend one time backups to DVD. (Single layer or even dual layer if need be)...then more regular backups to an external HD.

The prices of both are coming down rapidly now, and for a backup drive the speed doesnt need to be super quick.

I have an IDE in an external caddy at the moment (120 gig), which I'm using as a backup. I'm due to purchase another 320 gig (ish) soon in another caddy, and that will be my backup sorted for another year or so at least.
 
tapes are slow, unreliable and expensive.

Just how many external drives do you have and what sizes are they?

You can get a nice 500gb SATA2 drive for £63

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=284982

and a SATA USB external case for £30

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=310738

you could even get a 750gb drive for £130 ish

Hard Drives are definitely the cheapest and easiest option for fast, reliable backups. With anything major being backed up to DVD as well for added cover.
 
If you move to something like a Netgear NAS box or a Buffalo Terastation, make sure you set it to a mode where there's some sort of redundancy. A Terabyte across 4 discs is all very well, but if one of those 250GB disks fails then you've lost everything.

You could build something that'll do the job quite nicely with software RAID and a bunch of disks. Grab yourself a case (click will hold 8 SATA drives), stick a motherboard in it, a copy of XP hacked to run RAID5 or a copy of Server 2003 if you're feeling flush (or a flavour of Linux if you're happy with that) and away you go. If you want further info or help then give me a shout. One of these with 8 x 400GB drives running RAID5 with a hotspare would give you just under 2.5TB with a spare disk to kick-in should any of the 7 disks in the array fail. Then just pop it on the network and you're laughing.
Software RAID5 isn't the quickest thing on the planet, but for archiving usage it's perfect.
 
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