Rick Kelly writes:
> I have 2 Exabyte 8700LT 8mm drives (8500 in disguise), and I can squeeze
> 10 gigs per tape on these. And the tapes are about $6. But exabyte doesn't
> make these any more, just the Mammoth drives with $100 tapes. That's 4 times
> the capacity of my drives at almost 17 times the price for media.

I'm at a loss as to what to do about long-term backups too.  My 4-Gig
DDS-2 just doesn't cut it any more and the denser backup media is
priced ridiculously high (both for the media and for the drive).

For the time being, I've decided that disk-to-disk backups using
compressed tar's is the cheapest and easiest way to go.  I can get a
75-gig disk drives for the essentially the same price per gig as 20Gig
DDS media ($4/gig for disk, $3/gig for dds-4 media).  When you add in
the $1400 for the dds4 drive it looks like an even simpler choice.

I do wish I had a solution for long-term backups, but tape media folks
are smoking crack if they think I'll pay anywhere near disk prices for
tape.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Rupprecht    <wolfgang@wsrcc.com>     http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
Coming soon: GPS mapping tools for Open Systems. http://www.gnomad-mapping.com/