Tape backups are suitable for very large volume data storage, using high
quality commercial drives. Typical home-user tape backup units are not
reliable enough, and offer no significant advantages over hard drive, CD or
DVD. I have never been a fan of tape backup units for home users, but I have
used them very effectively in a commercial environment.

It's an old hobby horse of mine, but I maintain that if a backup set can't
be restored to a clean hard drive from a floppy boot then what's the point
of creating it? Most Windows-based tape backup software require Windows to
be re-installed before the system can be restored. Of course, there are
many different reasons for maintaining a backup, but a fast restore to a new
hard drive strikes me as a fairly important feature.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP W95/W98
Don@NoSpam wrote in message ...
As usual I probably am out of step with the world, but I've never cared
for tape backup. That was really driven home on an HP 1000 system on time
when the tape drive refused to read beyond record #n for whatever reason.

Not only that, supposed I backup my OS with some compressing BU scheme
and I want to recover the Registry. How now brown cow? I've opted to
BU to CDs on an selected file basis. If I have to reinstall Win it
certainly does no good to recover from an image of the previous system.

I'd appreciate learing from tape backup advocates...

Don