New Tape Drives Are Worth a Look

by by Al Gordon

So now that you have the latest and greatest backup software, you need the latest and greatest devices on which to store the backup files. Submitted for your approval: the VXA-1 from Ecrix and the OnStream Echo tape drives. For more information about backup software, see my article in TNPC #4.18 "Retrospect: Is This a Better Backup?"

The long-established Travan technology occupies the low-end space in the tape backup world, with drives priced at $300 or less. Travan is slow, and tapes have a maximum capacity of 10GB native/20GB compressed; not enough to handle today's larger hard drives, much less workgroup or home networks. On the other hand, faster, high capacity technologies such as DLT tend to start just under $2,000 and quickly climb to $5,000 and beyond.

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