Backup Choices 9/30/03
Honestly, don't laugh at me for saying this, but a storage medium like a tape drive makes a very good choice.  Assuming that you might want to make more than one backup of your data and access far in the future.  If you only want one backup of your data, then an option like CD-Rs or DVD-Rs is probably a very good and cost-effective choice. If you are thinking that you might want to make lots of backups of your data over the next years and keep different copies around, then a tape drive might be a much better alternative.

Personally, I am a programmer, and I have a DDS-4 tape drive on my Sun workstation that I do backups on. It has a capacity of 20GB native/40GB compressed, assuming 2:1 ratio, which isn't unreasonable for the type of stuff I store on it. It works very well for me. If/when I, heaven forbid, accidentally delete a file or change it in a way that I don't remember, and for some reason a CVS copy isn't available, then I usually whip out the recent backups and start going through them extracting different versions of the file until I find what I screwed up recently and made it so things didn't work. Backups are also great  when one of your users comes up to you and says "I accidentally deleted a file just a month ago and need it back now..." You can say, oh, well, lets just look at the day before you deleted it on the backup tapes and voila! The file has come back from the dead.

There are usually a number of tape drives out there with more than enough capacity to backup your data on a single tape.  Of course, you can also have you data span multiple tapes and use a drive with a changer mechanism that will automatically switch between tapes when one is full.  These single unit tape switchers generally support 4 to 8 tapes.  If you need yet more capacity, then there are units with automated arms to pickup tapes and load them into the drives.  These are generally called tape libraries.  

Tapes really are relatively cheap for what they do in my opinion. Their price per gigabyte ratio is generally very good, even compared to cheap CD-Rs. When buying a tape drive, if you intend to do lots of backups at different dates, then make certain to carefully look for a drive that has cheap media. Media costs can rapidly exceed the initial cost for the drive. I wouldn't even worry that much about how much the drive itself costs.