On 22 May 2001, Jon Schewe wrote: > What do you all think of using tape vs hard drives for backup? You mentioned that your home network is a non-production network totalling to about 20GB, I'd use a hard drive simply because a 40 GB IDE drive is cheaper than even a crappy 20GB tape drive. I guess the main question is what are you backing up? What would your response be if your hard drive crashed right now? Would it be a tradgedy or a minor inconvenience? On my hard drive at home, I only have a few hundred MB of stuff I absolutely CANNOT lose. The rest (about 8 GB) would tick me of if I lost it but I'd get over it. A couple nights of rebuilding the OS and the incident is forgotten. So, I back up that few hundred MB daily into a tar file, it FTPs over to another computer for safety, and then when I feel like it I zap that to tape on my 4mm DAT drive. Every couple months I back up the other 8 GB into a massive tar file on another hard drive, just to cut my restore time into an evening rather than a couple all night sessions. The only real reason for my tape drive is because it was given to me, it works, so I might as well use it. I feel slightly better knowing a copy of my important data is sitting in a basement on the other side of town just in case my apartment bursts into flames. Aside from natural disasters, an on site hard drive solution works well. In my experience, I've only used a backup ONCE because of a hardware failure. In the other 1,000 times it was to restore accidentily deleted files, corrupted files, etc and an on site hard drive solution would have worked better because of its speed. Each has its pluses, weigh your solution accordingly. -Brian