Thanks for the link to the article.

I first used floppies for backups but when hdd sizes got bigger, floppies became a chore. I then got a tape drive and backed up to tape. It was better than floppies but agonizingly slow. I dropped tape when hdd prices came down low enough where it was practical to use an external hdd for backup.

I now have multi-terabytes of stuff I want to keep backed up (mostly movies on my NAS). I have been using an external hdd but maybe I need to look into current generation tape storage.

Right, I don't think tape is a good option for us normal consumers. We usually do not have enough data to store to make the price difference to disks significant.

margrave said:

... strollin: Were you speaking of personal/consumer use of tape backups? I think this whole tape-backup thing pertains to commercial/business use, not consumer use.

I was talking about for my personal use. Most likely will stick with external hdd but always willing to take a look at alternatives. For multiple backups, tape is definitely less expensive since you only need 1 drive but can purchase multiple tape cartridges. Not sure if there are any consumer grade tape backup units that are worth looking at.

That's all well and good but I need to backup terabytes of data, thumb drives and spare hdds don't cut it for that. I currently use a pair of dedicated 5 TB hdds to do my backups.

It seem to me that different people have different needs for backup and therefore use different methods.
strollin has a need for large volume of space for backups. If he used my method he would have a bunch of 250GB SSD's with backups.

If I used strollin method I would have a bunch of wasted space on drives.

Different strokes for different folks.