Have been using 8mm Exabyte tape with Mezzo software for quite some time now.

Caveat for Mezzo: You have to be very careful with how you organize your files, and watch out for conflicts with other software, or it can get very f'in ugly.

When it's used properly, Mezzo is a beautiful thing. It keeps track of what is already backed up, and only backs up files that have been modified or newly created since the last backup.

If you want something that is more redundant, uses more media (therefore more time consuming), but relatively idiot proof, Retrospect is the way to go.

Hope that helps.

thanks a bunch! what does a system like this cost and what is the media cost?

Ugh, still too much money! :)
Welcome to po' ass land over here.
Its hard hard hard to get a band to pay 30 bucks for tapes, good luck for me to get em paying 80 bucks on media :(
Anyone know anything cheaper?

don't forget that you can use Mezzo with 4mm Datadats as well...those run just over $10 a pop.

are you using this with PT or DP? with those (and other video/avid apps) you'd really dig the drag and drop way Mezzo works. that being said, the Mezzo folk are way behind the game in terms of device support...still no DVD-RAM and no plans to support it in the next big rev!?!

and i bring up DVD-RAM 'cause i recently had a 4mm datadat drive wrinkle just the 1st inch or so of a tape....which with mezzo means that ALL is lost, even though there's still probably 4 gigs of valid data on there...this really blows, and is why i'm switching to DVD-RAM as a medium. i believe that Retrospect has a much better rebuilding/data recovery function, but it's been years since i used it on a regular basis, so you really shoudln't believe me on that one.

and finally there's the fact that a decent version of Retro can be had for $50 or so.....but i still use Mezzo go figure...

I'm using Retrospect with a dds2 dat streamer as a general backup tool. (Retrospect 'knows' cdr's as well)
Small things can be done directly on cdr, but you better check the quality first - I just lost some data due to faulty cdr's.

Kind regards
Walter

quote:Originally posted by Aaron Carey:
Ugh, still too much money! :)
Welcome to po' ass land over here.
Its hard hard hard to get a band to pay 30 bucks for tapes, good luck for me to get em paying 80 bucks on media :(
Anyone know anything cheaper?

If you're talkin bout 8mm exabyte tapes, there is a 4GB version that goes for around $6 per tape. And they're even cheaper when you buy in bulk.

I do my backups to an external Maxtor 80 gig Firewire drive. Works like a charm and pretty cheap as they come IMHO!

quote:Originally posted by Ang1970:

If you're talkin bout 8mm exabyte tapes, there is a 4GB version that goes for around $6 per tape. And they're even cheaper when you buy in bulk.

we use Exabyte tapes (160 M) with our SADiE Artemis DAW; works su-poy-bly.