Backup device:Tape vs CD-RW

From: Gaétan Martineau (gmarti@mediom.qc.ca)
Date: 01/21/03 

From: Gaétan Martineau <gmarti@mediom.qc.ca>
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 22:14:31 -0500

Strange conversation, minutes ago, with a computer vendor. I asked for
his advice, got quite surprised, and finally submit here my question to
your kind knowledge or experience to finally get another feedback.

Problem:
I am about to change computer and think, in the process, of also buying
a *good, safe and easy* backup solution for personal use at home.

What I think is:
I am interested in a tape drive for 8mm mammoth 20 Gb exabyte
cartridges. a) It stores plenty b) It would backup data on our home LAN
(3 computers) through NFS and maybe smbtar c) it would backup (through
crontab) automatically except for feeding the cartridge into the drive
and store it away afterwards d) this type of cartridge is compatible
with what I use at work (for seismic research) so I can finally easily
exchange data. e) I can keep a whole M$ partition on an exabyte and if
virus comes, "tar xvzf" will take care of the rest. So no antivirus ***
to maintain or worry about. f) Pretty well same for linux;(except for
viruses) I can keep a complete Linux install on a cartridge, so if I
want to do the spring clean up, I can batch restore a "tar xvzf" instead
of interactively reinstalling from CD's.

What he said was:
Tape drives are not so much used anymore nowadays. A good solution is to
use a 650 Mbytes CD-RW. You format it and then backing up your stuff is
just a matter of "drag and drop" from the Windows explorer. Cheap,
convenient. And you do not need as much as 20Gb. You do not backup your
programs. You don't need to do that; it does not happen often that the
whole computer goes wreck.

What do you think??? I am about to buy a 60 Gb hard drive and the
proposed backup solution is : ... 650Mb CD-RW

Feedback and opinion greatly appreciated.

Gaetan