Wojciech Puchar writes:

>anyway IDE drive sometimes connected as backup is reliable storage
>compared to any tapes.

Yes, with redundancy (certain RAID levels) and otherwise good
hardware in the disk server, it's quite reliable.  Of course you
can't lock it up in a tape safe.  That's a flaw of this approach.
If your business depends on it, maybe a combination of methods
is the best approach.  Here, in academia, the RAID solution
seems to be good enough but we'll see how it'll work out in the
long run.

>and DLT tapes as i see costs quite lot

Here in Germany, the 40/80 Gig DLT tapes cost as much as a small
IDE hard drive of about the same capacity.  And the costs scale
linearly with IDE drives with larger sizes but not with tapes
(in my experience).  And larger drives will drop in price while
DLT media mostly remains the same.

-- 
Matthias Buelow;  mkb@{mukappabeta.de,informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de}

    ``Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.''
        -- William of Ockham (~1285-1349, "Occam's Razor")