[ericwass]

Since Retrospect doesn't work on my Que USB CD-RW and backing up to CD seems like a drag anyway, I've been looking at tape drives, specifically the OnStream Echo 30. Does anybody have any experience with this (or any other) tape drive they'd share with me. Any other good, affordable ideas for quick, reliable backup?
I'm running a G4 450 256 with the built in 22GB and a Maxtor 30GB EIDE added on.
Thanks.

[tonymac]

From what I've heard second hand the Onstream drives are excellent for workstation or small network backups. I'd recommend staying away from 4mm DDS2 DAT drives, because they tend to develop head alignment problems that cause old tapes to be unreadable. DLT drives are expensive, but they're very fast and reliable and you can find multi DLT changers for backing up huge amounts of data. You probably wouldn't be happy with the Travan drives. I have the Aiwa USB Travan drive at home, and it's good enough for basic backups, but it's loud, slow and only fits 8 gig on a tape (compressed). Of these, I'd recommend the Onstream for your setup since it offers a lot of the benefits of DLT at a significantly lower cost.

Tony

[mcdoken]

I've been searching for some time myself. I finally settled on the OnStream USB30 because of the 30Gig capacity and the fact that it costs 1/2 of any comparable solution (even the SCSI or as yet unavailable FireWire versions of the OnStream drive itself). However I have not yet been able to get it to work. Dantz and Onstream claim that Retrospect 4.3 does work where previous versions did not. Unfortunately I haven't yet succeeded.

My second choice was the apparently increasingly popular Exabyte VXA drives.

[ericwass]

From what I can see the OnStream 30 USB is not Mac compatible. Given that it's USB and the would be driven my a mac version of Retrospect, I don't understand why it wouldn't work, but that's the impression I got from the website. Anyone know differently?