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Looking into backup media options this morning, I came to the conclusion that I guess everyone else had come to already: tape drives are impractical for backups, because disk drives have gotten so inexpensive.

Why do I say tape drives are impractical? Because I can’t find a tape drive for less than $500. Here’s 36/72 GB internal DAT drive for $554. Most of the drives I found cost more, and require SCSI interfaces (which are no longer standard on Macs), not to mention periodic head cleaning. Tape media is pricey (DAT-72 tapes cost $20 apiece). This particular $554 drive is internal, so if I want to back up other systems I have to do it over the network.

Maybe a better way to spend $554 is on 1.5 Terabytes of disk storage. Yep, I can buy three 500 GB hard drives for $165 apiece, which would give me the advantages of faster throughput, portability, and random access. And a whole lot of storage.

Seems to me if tapes were still a viable backup mechanism, the drives would be fast, have multiple interfaces, sell for about $99, and be more reliable than, say, the two DAT drives I used to use that died after a year apiece. Look at the example of inkjet printers: Amazon sells the Epson Stylus C88+ InkJet printer for $69.95. Sure, they make their money on the ink and paper. The people with tape drives have to buy media, too.

Iomega, famous for its Zip drive, has a “removable hard drive” product called the REV. It seems to offer the best of tape and fixed-disk worlds: pay for the complex mechanism just once, buy as much storage as you need, swap media around for offsite backups, etc. Its disks are likely more reliable than tapes, and offer faster (random) access to data.

The one problem of tape-media solutions that REV hasn’t yet addressed is cost. The drive costs over $300 (amazon: Firewire REV for Macs, $333; USB 2.0 REV for Win/Mac, $327), and a 4-pack of 35GB disks costs $180. See below for a cost comparison.

GraniteDigital makes an interesting hybrid solution: firewire enclosures with hot-swappable drive bays. The unit is portable. Additional “media,” in the form of hard drives, can be purchased in various sizes and unlimited quantities. The device of course offers random access to files, is maintenance free, and supports offsite backups — although I’d guess hard drives are less robust, meaning more sensitive to physical trauma, than tapes or even REV cartridges. Best of all, this solution benefits from the aggressive pricing in the disk-drive market.

Here’s a table that rounds up my options. The items are somewhat arbitrarily configured, in terms of storage space; the three options with removable media would show a lower $/GB price if I’d buy more media, but I wouldn’t want to spend more money to get started.

If nothing else, this investigation suggests that setting up a mirrored RAID for every workstation is an important first step in data longevity, as that halves the risk of a bad disk destroying days, weeks, or months of files. But a mirrored RAID won’t insulate anyone from an app that goes haywire and corrupts its database, or an accidental deletion, or a virus attack or other exploit.

So, it’s still necessary to make backups. But I have to say, I don’t love any of these options. Maybe I’m back to Amazon S3 after all, e.g. via JungleDisk. Is there really any difference between renting storage from Amazon and buying fresh media every few months? I guess that’s an analysis for another day.