Thread: External DAT Tape Drive

Don't worry prices are crap, same money buys a 2TB HDD and less than half that will get a 1TB drive...

For the price of the DAT and given its storage capacity you're better off looking at a Blu-Ray DVD burner.

My preference is to store everything on RAID5 on a NAS unit. I also backup onto archival quality DVD's (not cheap, but less failures) anything that I really really want to keep. As for the NAS units cost is about $1K for a 1TB unit and it can be used by all my home PC's. I now need to get a bigger one though

Is there any such thing as "mirroring software" for external USB HDDs, or did I just invent that concept then?

Originally Posted by joel_nicholson

Is there any such thing as "mirroring software" for external USB HDDs, or did I just invent that concept then?

There could be, but you'll have to look in to it

Originally Posted by dm_td5

There could be, but you'll have to look in to it

GOOD GRIEF

LMAO!

Originally Posted by joel_nicholson

Is there any such thing as "mirroring software" for external USB HDDs, or did I just invent that concept then?

Yeah, stuff like secondcopy or even Microsoft's Synctoy will do this. However, be careful....automatic mirroring is just that - so if you delete a file you want on your PC, the software will quickly delete it on your "backup" drive. Used this way, it's doesn't replace proper backups!

FWIW, I stopped using tape long ago - storage capacity never kept up with hard disks, prices for the decent stuff (Like LTO) makes the one you quote for DAT look like small change, and unless you go for a linear tape format (DLT, LTO, etc.) you WILL have problems reading old tapes in new drives in a few years time.

I would mirror to an external disk, but also copy the critical stuff to a couple of DVD's, and re-cut at least one copy once a year or so to new media....plus, the REALLY critical stuff can be emailed to a spare Google account as an attachment.

You could try one of these I have used them on sites with limited data to backup.

http://www.iomega.com/direct/product...=1189722041761

I recently bought a Western Digital World Book 2 1 Tb normal or 500 Gb with mirrored drives for about $600
Just ignore the MioNet software and set it up on your network this gives capacity with redundancy.

Originally Posted by dm_td5

For the price of the DAT and given its storage capacity you're better off looking at a Blu-Ray DVD burner.

My preference is to store everything on RAID5 on a NAS unit. I also backup onto archival quality DVD's (not cheap, but less failures) anything that I really really want to keep. As for the NAS units cost is about $1K for a 1TB unit and it can be used by all my home PC's. I now need to get a bigger one though

What are the brand of archival DVD's? I've been looking for something like this for a while.