Tapes suck, there’s no question about that! It’s surprising how many places still use them for backup, although I suppose when absolutely massive amounts of data need to be backed up there isn’t a good alternative yet (where are you, inexpensive, massive static holographic memory?) But for individual users and for most small to medium size businesses hard drive backup is a better option; it’s faster, more stable, backed up content is online (or preferably near-online), and the backed up content can be accessed instantaneously without having to read the tape while nervously waiting to see if the dreaded tape read error pops up.
Since the backup hard drives would preferably be cycled so that one or more of them would be physically disconnected from the system to ward off virus/hacker attacks or electric surge damage, it is necessary to be able to disconnect the drive without having to reboot the system. While RAID controllers routinely support hot-swap, few SATA controllers (and probably none of IDE/ATA, or SCSI controllers) do, and even the RAID controllers don’t usually support hot-swap for single volumes. However, the Silicon Image -based SATA controllers like those from Addonics do support hot swap. The other alternative is to use external USB 2.0 or Firewire drives, or—better yet—an internal mobile tray with a USB2-to-SATA bridge. I was glad to see that mobile trays with integrated USB2-to-SATA bridge were finally made available by Addonics, as in the past the only option to achieve the same was to use a separate USB2-to-SATA bridge and then try to figure out where to attach it inside the system chassis. Of course, USB 2.0 interface is not as speedy as SATA (the basic SATA-150 is about three times faster than USB 2.0), but it is still a lot faster than tapes.
There are number of excellent utilities and applications to effectively back up your valuable data to the removable drive. To mention couple of the countless selection, Genie Backup Manager is handy for agent-based workstation backup on a LAN. To back up my workstation I use the excellent Super Flexible File Synchronizer to automatically sync various data directories once a night to the backup drive cartridge currently inserted in the mobile tray. During the day I know no backups are running so I can safely pull the drive (after ejecting it using the Safely Remove Hardware -tool from the system tray), and replace it with another one to be updated the following night. Now if I had a small fire-safe to keep the offline drives! Some people take a drive off the premises once a week (in case one building burns down, the data is still safe 🙂 ) or, if they’re really dedicated, keep one backup drive in the bank safety-deposit box and swap it, say, monthly.