Affordability and dependability more than compensate for their lack of coolness Lately, customers are giving me flak about tape drives. Some simply don’t want to spend the time or money swapping tapes and moving the appropriate tape off-site; others just don’t think they are cool enough. There are many alternatives to tape drives, but Fonzie factor aside, having a tape at the end of a storage chain is still the best safety net.Disk-based backups, for example, are much easier because storage prices are so low. Going from a 240GB RAID system to a 480GB RAID system can often be accomplished within the same enclosure at only the man-hour cost of installation and a few hundred dollars per disk. But the result could be a real-time mirror of the production storage environment located on the original 240GB.Some backup software vendors are making use of this and similar scenarios. StorageTek’s EchoView product line, for example, captures all events on the network in real time rather than the scheduled snapshots typical of tape drives. Disk-based backups also complement products such as Veritas’ Volume Manager. This is a disaster recovery tool designed to mirror entire computing operations between remote sites. With leased lines squeezing your bandwidth, having a disk solution at either end capable of taking information as quickly as it’s delivered can be a real advantage. For small office and personal use (such as for weenie road-warrior executives who are too busy to back up their important files until someone steals their notebooks), USB 2.0 is a boon. I know one sys admin with a problem road-warrior who was too busy to back up, yet every emergency involved a “critical” file. Two hundred dollars bought this guy an external 120GB USB 2.0 hard disk that simply plugged into his docking station. A little time at the scripting console forced a backup to that drive whenever the user re-docked. Any problems at home or on the road could be easily solved by making the drive temporarily available on the network.I’m still not such a big fan of optical backup solutions. For personal use, I suppose they’re fine. But in a corporate environment, that’s simply too many disks. Even if some maniac were to use the upcoming 29GB DVD-ROM disks for general backup purposes, that’s still a ratio of four to one when compared with single 120GB tape.And speaking of tape, what’s all the negativity? Tape is a proven medium that’s kept up with the times from a capacity perspective. If disaster recovery is on your mind, who wants to swap out hard disks and go drop one in a safety deposit box every week? Products like Veritas’ SANPoint Control and HP’s OpenView Storage Area Manager have come a long way in their ability to integrate multiple storage mediums from multiple vendors into a single storage flow. Immediately available information sits close to readily available information, which in turn can regularly update slowly available information such as the tape library. Users can have most of their backup requests solved at high speed, but if something really goes wrong, the company still has a full data backup in a vault.There are downsides to tape drives. For example, you can’t leave a tape in storage indefinitely, so scheduled updates of your off-site stored data are still required. But for the most part they simply work and they fit into most budgets. Additional disks are speedy middle men, but when things take a turn for the worse, having a full set of tapes elsewhere is priceless.