“Tape drives are slow compared to disk drives, but can back up large quantities of data. Today, it’s normal to have a 20GB hard drive on a home computer, and hard drives of 160GB or more can be found on our PCs. If you tried to back up such a 20GB hard drive on the common 1.44MB diskettes, you would need about 14,223 diskettes–not very practical. A tape drive, on the other hand, can store up to 40GB for about $15 per tape. The 14,223 diskettes would cost over $2,100 for the cheapest kind. Tape machines are comparatively slow, therefore, I start my backups at bedtime, so they have them done the next morning. In fact, by leaving a tape in the drive, you can have cron do the job automagically whenever you want.”
Link: LinuxJournal
