The easiest way to ensure complete backups is to buy a tape drive with the capacity to back up all your data on one tape. Other important factors are speed, compatibility with your software and price. .
A Bewildering Array.
Several nontraditional forms of backup -- CD-R, Zip and ORB removable media -- get a lot of press. A CD-R solution is fine for permanent storage or for creating libraries of material, but a CD-R's capacity is only 650 MB for 74-minute media and 700 MB for 80-minute media; that won't cover most enterprises' backup needs. Castlewood Systems' ORB drives offer 2.2 GB of space, but that's still probably not enough to do a full system backup. And at only 250 MB, Iomega Corp.'s Zip drive certainly isn't adequate. .
The bottom line: Tape drives are a low-cost, reliable solution for your SOHO or remote environment. .
One viable low-end tape solution is Travan, a QIC (Quarter-Inch Cartridge) technology from Imation Corp. (spun off from 3M Corp. in 1996). Travan cartridges are inexpensive and pervasive, widely available in consumer-electronics stores. Companies that produce Travan drives include Compaq Computer Corp., HP, IBM, Seagate Technology and Tecmar. Travan devices deliver up to 20 GB of compressed capacity (10 GB native), and come in IDE, SCSI, USB and parallel-port versions. Data-transfer rates for the IDE and SCSI versions are about 60 MB per minute in native mode.
A good example of an efficient, low-cost Travan device is HP's 14-GB Colorado tape drive, which is priced at less than $300 and comes with versatile backup software. One feature that keeps the cost down on this drive is its IDE interface. While IDE is slower and less capable than SCSI, the use of an IDE interface takes the cost of SCSI integration off the drive and the cost of a host adapter off the server or client. .
This type of solution works very well as an addition to an office manager's or network manager's workstation, letting backups be performed from that location.
