What is the cheapest backup method now? It seems like consumer-grade tape devices never kept up with the leap in size, so what are people doing to back up their 100s of gigs of data at home?

The "Cheapest" method would be to get Jumpdrives. Or if you could afford the 2GB Jumpdrive, then for that price you could get an External HD at a reasonable size that has a USB port. Probably at least 80+GB and higher.

Tape Drives come in large sizes...

It may be a hassle to start up, but it's good to mention to google email accounts, GMail, do offer 2.7Gig of space. So you could upload several files there for backup. As well some software will facilitate the whole task and even set the gmail account as a secondary hard drive.

Originally Posted by nick89

Tape Drives come in large sizes...

Eww tape drives Seriously, I don't know when was the last time I saw them. I know I still have one laying around somewhere...

2.7G from Gmail is good only for making a backup of a few documents, unless of course one has several Gmail accounts. I prefer saving my files to a CD. That way, I also classify my documents into categories/folders.

There are backup softwares out there that can be used. In the event a backup has not been made, I think SpinRite will be a good data recovery solution.

I am with 64-bit Man, I have not seen tape drives in ages. They may have big size ones, but are there any capable consumer models available?

My problem is I want to be able to back up all your data. That used to be possible with the old tape drives as they were bigger than the hard drives of the era.

I am guessing there is nothing out there now that is going to give me an affordable backup medium for 300 gigs of data. Probably the cheapest way would be to buy second drives and just copy things over. I was hoping there would be some keen invention to provide a lower cost per gig solution.

Jump Drives are okay for key data, but can't back up anything substantial.

Well, unless I'm mistaken tape drives are still are very popular way used to backup data on a company-wide scale....unless I'm mistaken...

Slashmire is right. Tape drives are still used everywhere to do "global" backups. You can get huge tapes aswell as high quality tapes. The only downside is the cost of the drive...

Otherwise I'd recommend an external harddisk...

Is it a good idea to backup with an online company? I know they claim that it is good because they are storing "off-site" and all but I am skiddish.