[?] backup on tape or DVD

I wrote myself a couple scripts to tar and gzip the more important parts of my servers every so often. Since each backup eats up about 4 GB per server I am looking into a solution to back those up on a medium.

So I was wondering what the advantages and disadvantages of backups on DVD vs tape (DAT) drive are.
Afaik, DVD writers are available from $130, whereas a DAT drive costs around $400, let alone the tapes you need. Those SONY rackmountables do look nice, but are they really worth the extra money?
With hardware drivers for unix/linux it's not impossible to mount a DVD writer and use it, so what's the deal?

Thanks,
Till

Hi Till,

I think DVD-RW will catch on, but it's still not implemented very widly. Not at lot of people have DVD writers (affordable as they have become.)

With Tape, you've got at least 20Gb of uncompressed backup space and you don't have to worry about the tapes getting 'scratched' like with DVDs. Tape access can be faster than DVD access (if you pay for it) and yes, it's peanuts to mount.

I guess if you're ALWAYS going to have 4GB of data (and no more) then DVD might be cheapest, but otherwise, Tape is just so much easier! You can always compress 20Gb to 40Gb etc., so you only need one back-up tape for each business day of the week!

Those SONY rigs... yeah, it's just a whole lot of fancy monitoring tools - only makes sense if you're backing up 20Gb+ (ie., 500 terminal users) and if you need to know the temperature inside the rack at any point in time... I guess the one thing the SONY DDS and AIT drives are good for is if you have 10 offices and each of them needs to run a back-up during the same 4-hour period (ie., 2am to 6am) Try backing up 800GB from 10 different departments in 4 hours... (exactly.) DDS (esp., AIT) technology is for larger scale backup implementations.

I use CD-RW's! EVEN cheaper! Pain in the *** chaning them over though... still, when it comes to April 5th - some data is better than no data!


Nao