tape

Sounds as if you have put tape to the acid test! Glad it worked out.

I'm a bit envious of your tape autoloader and the automated approach it allows. I have a single LTO3 drive hooked up to the SCSI port on a PC in my network. It's quite cumbersome. I manually copy over files from the Mac to the hard drive on the PC, then manually copy to the LTO3 tape. The only advantage to all this hands-on work is that I can create separate tape libraries for individual clients, which makes it easier to find files I need to restore.

I second the opinions about tape vs. hard drive. Before the LTO3 I had about 20 hard drives for backups, and one failure was enough to convince me that they are a terrible idea for archiving. Archives should be able to sit on a shelf and work after years of inactivity -- exactly what you should NOT try with a hard drive.

I don't think I'm going to spend the money for the tape autoloader. My next solution: RAID5 or 6 for active media files, Time Machine for project files, and my cumbersome but solid LTO3 system for (1) video from non-tape sources and (2) finished projects that I'm removing from the RAID.

Then there's the issue of off-site backup in case the whole building goes up in flames.... What do you do about that?

Bob C