From Terabyte Drives Make It Challenging To Create Regular Backups
How to make a real backup economically? Backup devices are very expensive now compared to primary storage
I've always believed that a backup isn't a backup as long as it is on spinning magnetic media. But non-hard drive media at a reasonable price just hasn't kept up with the growth of our hard drives. The Iomega REV drives are one of the best solutions I've found, but at only 35GB capacity, they are somewhat limited when compared to a terrabyte drive, and they are also more expensive than the hard drives you'd be backing up, and they are difficult to find at any local store. I had a 30GB tape drive, but I haven't seen that drive sold in years, so I have no idea where to get more tapes. I haven't seen a tape backup solution of that size sold in a retail store for years.
It seems the only cheap backup solution is to have multiple terabyte drives, and make backup copies from a main drive to one or more backup drives. Then keep the backup drives offline until they are needed for the next backup of the main drive. One might be tempted on subsequent backups to try and do an incremental backup, but that can be difficult. One tool that might help is robocopy which is in the Windows 2003 Resource Kit. Or it might be simpler to just periodically wipe your backup drive clean, then create a complete copy of the working primary. Of course you've got some risks: What if your primary fails while your in the process of making a new copy to the backup drive you just wiped? If you keep a couple of backup drives and can alternate between them, then hopefully you're never without a complete backup of your data.