If you’re backing up individual pieces of data that will remain unchanged for long periods of time then CD or DVD is for you. If you’re backing up .alot of data where you will need to run full backups every couple of months or more tapes become cheaper as you start burning through discs and drives with CD and DVD.
I’m backing up two file server with 1 TB of data and 260 GB of data (the upgrades from 60 to 260 GB just arrived this morning). In that 1 TB is all of my persoanal files and many constantly changing multimedia items from my brother and sister. In the 260 TB server there are business financial documents that my dad has stored on our network for convienience, all of the family financial data, all of my brother and sister’s school work and images of the OS on each machine to restore in the event of a disk failure. There are also stored copies of my grandfather’s financial data. There are 10 clients on the network: 5 IBM ThinkPads, 2 stock desktops and 3 desktops that I built, and soon we’re gaining another desktop that I assembled, and there are five users who use computers extensively.
Guess what: not a waste for me.
Frankly, with older DDS-2 drives coming in cheaper than DVD drives and being more reliable while offering similar capacity and higher reliability, why wouldn’t you use them?
