Why back up with tape, its slow, and they wear out too fast or at least the Quic units I used to use did. Went through about 4 and many tapes before switching to rewriteable CDs.
I suggest backing up to a workstation using Winrar (available as Linux or Windows zip program with batch file capability to create CD or DVD size volumes then copying them to CD or DVD the next day.
The workstation can have a big cheap ide drive and as files are compressed they retain their status when uncompressed where as if you tried to just copy to CD everything becomes read only. Compression greatly reduces file size so you may manage even/odd day backups on workstation. Lastly most times if a file is overwritten you simply restore from workstation in seconds - versus time spent searching through tape. Even from a CD is fast due to random access capability.
Here should be a sample of a batch file that creates a backup automatically split in 650 meg highly compressed chunks. You will notice it is set to have 3% extra data wrote to help rebuild in case of a bad sector - don't know if its necessary but can tell you the backups have always restored what and when I wanted.
ftp://64.114.126.34/buOdddayWinrar-bat.bak www.rarlab.com for the Winrar program.
I expect the above file could be improved upon in many ways though it works fine as is. Adjust as appropriate to your data and disk size, will look forward to seeing any suggested improvements.
A DVDwriter should be a little over $200.00 U.S. now with rewriteable DVDs at about $6.00 . My next workstation will have this convenience.
Ken
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