There are some pretty cheap tape backup options available these days.

Tape backups are cheap only if you don't value your time and your convenience and if you are prepared to accept limited reliability from the medium itself.

Tapes that are used frequently wear out. Depending on what software you are using, you can have a five-tape set that is good for nothing but a paperweight if you have a single corrupted byte in the wrong place on the tape.

Tapes are serial access only. If you want to recover a single file from a tape, you can spend upwards of an hour just finding it if your tapes are big enough and densely packed enough.

I just yesterday purchased a 60 GB hard drive that will go inside my computer and be used for nothing but backup purposes. Total cost? $129. Whenever the mood hits me, I will just mirror my C: drive to that backup drive -- probably won't take more than half an hour to do it. I have full, fast, random access to every backup file, and pretty good reliability. Unless both my C: drive and my backup drive were to fail simultaneously, I am at no risk of ever losing data.

I suppose if you were archiving terrabytes of data and never anticipated having to retrieve any of it, a tape drive might make sense. But for my limited purposes, a single "spare" hard drive seems the best.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"