With IDE 80-100Gb drives readily available under $300 -- Dell recently had a special sale where I grabbed an 80Gb drive for $160 -- this seems like the cheapest and most flexible "backup", IMHO. (Best: Put a RAID together, a la Promise card.)

That said, I've had an Ecrix VXA drive for 18mos -- it stores 33Gb on a $70 tape, and seemed reasonable at the $499 discounted entry price. It hasn't really let me down so far, though throughput seems slow on my aging PII/300.

Agreed that DVD variants are promising, however... I'm not too familiar with these products, but check out the Pioneer drives coming out (also licensed by Apple).

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Empeg Mk. 2 #626, 18Gb blue | Kenwood KMD-X92. 2000 VW Passat wagon.