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Recommend against using tapes


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I spent far too many weeks repeatedly testing, troubleshooting, and spouting profanities at my old tape drive system which the Retrospect Tech Support claimed should work with Retrospect, yet never consistently did. I found my entire experience with tapes to be nothing but unpleasant. Thus I'm here to share an alternative for the small business or home user, which is working far smoother, faster, and is more reliable in my opinion:

 

What I have done in with my small company, is substitute the entire tape system for a meager 1.5 Terabyte External hard drive. The external drive itself is a Maxtor OneTouch Turbo III and is about the size and weight of a college level physics book. It's essentially (2) 750GB hard drives, stacked one on top of the other, and encased in a hard plastic shell with nicely gripping rubber. The external drive by default runs as a Raid 0 setup but can be easily changed to a Raid 1 (for those that don't know, a Raid 1 setup means that you get half the usable storage space, but it duplicates everything on the first disk to the second, so if god forbid one of the two drives failed you don't lose any of your data. A Raid 0 simply links the two drives together to act as a singe supersized hard drive with a very fast transfer rate, but if either drives fail (which in and of itself is highly unlikely, though not impossible) you lose all your data). The external drive supports USB, USB 2.0, Firewire a (400MB/s transfer), and Firewire b (800MB/s transfer rate). The cost of this pretty piece of hardware is approximate $800, but consider high quality new tape drives go for $1500 (not including the cost of the tapes themselves) and up, I think this makes for an excellent alternative which I recommend for anyone and everyone.

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