Tape backup system recommendations for about 10gb of data

DDS 4 is well worth considering. It is one of the older and very well established formats using 4mm tapes. Which by the way these tapes are the most aforable. Here is a link to a Seagate 24gb drive.
http://www.pricewatch.com/h/prc.aspx?i=41&a=3149&f=1

I'm with Cyber.  10 gigs is really a small amount of data in today's terms.  You could use any combination of RAID and external storage.  Maybe you could get a RAID card with another internal drive and mirror them to prevent a damaged disk from taking you down.  Then you could back up to the external disk using something as simple as Windows backup or Robocopy in a batch file.

If you really wanted to go the tape route, then dovidmichel's advice is solid.  One thing to think about with tape drives is that you'll probably need to buy a SCSI card for the drive to interface with.

Jared

An alternative to DDS tape is to back up to DVD-R - you'd need 3 DVDs (or probably less if it your data compresses a reasonable amount). The price of the media has dropped to the point that it's worth considering. This would also give you "archival" copies of your data.

If you still want tape...AIT and AIT2 tapes are generally less expensive, reliable and will get decent performance

thanks everyone for your advice.
The only downside to external usb2 ide drive is the unit would not be stored off-site, in case of fire.   But I will seriously consider it.  Maybe I could get a padded case to transport the drive off site.

I did a bit of searching for DDS4 drives, and they seem to run $400-800, except for the PRICEWATCH link Davidmichael sent, which has drives from $200 on up.  Except I wouldn't trust the sellers listed there.  

Does anyone have recommendations for reliable discount sources for DDS4 drives, so I can accurately compare external IDE vs Tape?
thanks!

If you go with DDS - make sure you verify the backup! In the enterprise space DDS is referred to as WORM - Write Once, Read Maybe.

Also make sure that you do a test restore of your data. You do not have a backup until you have tested the restore.

Sorry to sound like a panic merchant, but it's better to test now and resolve any problems than find out that your backups are toast the hard way.

The USB external drive is built for those purposes (i.e. Offsite storage in case of a disaster + easy restoration when such event will take place).

Cyber

Why not considered DAT-72 ? Compared to DDS-4, DAT-72 provide 36 - 72 GB storage space.
Check with HP for tape drives, if you purchase one, it will come with a backup software for your usage too.

I'm usiing DDS4 together with Veritas BackupExec on a Dell Dimension SC 1600.
Never had problems with it and would advice it :)

Thanks everyone for your advice.  After considering the options presented, I'm going to recommend an IDE external hard drive, due to its extreme ease of use.  I also may recommend a second, identical drive, to allow for swapping the drives off site for disaster recovery.

You'll probably need to get some sort of replication software to keep the disks identical if you want to do it in real time.  If not, then you could use robocopy in a scheduled task to get the data copied at night.

Jared

Also, be careful with some of the copy methods as they don't keep security permissions correct if that is of concern to you.  

Robocopy will retain security permissions if you include the S in the /copy command

i.e. /copy datSo

Robocopy.doc has all the goods.