[ale] Low-end tapedrives for SOHO environment

[griffisb at bellsouth.net]

I didn't want to hijack the Bacula thread, but did want to discuss various options for tape backups for the small office/home office environment. Particularly for a charity (church) on a budget.

I saw the discussions on good tape drive units, but know a church (or home user) would have problems justifying 1K or so. How do the IDE tape drives stack up as far as reliability? I saw that you can pick up a Seagate 10/20Gig IDE Tape Drive unit for $184 or so online. That is closer to my budget. Even saw them for less. Looks like tapes are in the $34 range. 

Are these suitable for smaller networks? I was thinking of home use, backing up my laptops to my Samba desktop, then doing a tape backup from the Samba server. I also REALLY liked the external harddrive solution, and that might work better for at a lower cost.

Assuming a tape drive for a small office or charity - would you schedule full backups weekly, and rotate 4 sets of tapes? Would you schedule bi-monthly and rotate 2 sets of tapes? I'm trying to get an idea of pricing, to determine how many tapes I would need.

My thought would be: full backups weekly, rotate 4 sets of tapes (if budget permits). Then do daily incremental backups. My main concerns would be PCs that payroll is stored on, and the PC baptisms, marriages and deaths are stored on. Right now everything went from cards into a database, but the database is not backed up. It took several months to go from cards to database, and the project is not complete. It would be a pain to lose it.

So, for the church:
1 IDE tape drive = appr. $200 (w/ shipping)

5 PC's @ 20 Gig per disk = 100 gigs of data   (I would need to size it again to validate) 

Full backups weekly, x 4 sets uncompressed = 400 gigs, or 40 tapes = appr. $1,360

$1,360 + $200 = YIKES!!!! Maybe the external disk drive is a better idea! Or maybe rotate 2 sets of tapes. Or maybe only backup 2 critical PC's. How do you guys price out back ups, and is the above pricing anywhere near accurate?