I was bitching about tape backups at one place, now I am moving another place from DVD based backups to tapes.

They ( the second place ) doesn’t use much storage so we can use older and cheaper tape drives from eBay.

I’ve paid £20 for 7 drives! These are not all the latest but included DAT-72 and DLT 40/80 can provide very decent capacity.

However I am planning to use DDS-3 , cartridges are physically small and much cheaper than others. 12GB provided is plenty of space for this system.

DVD backups on Linux, yeah they worked for a while, but stupid limitations of growiso ( it will not overwrite dvd-rw if it runs from cron ) and disc failures just made the decision for me. Tapes are much longer used in that role and the archiving software is totally integrated into Linux.