On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 03:35:17PM -0400, Brent L. Bates wrote:
...
>      Tape backups suddenly started taking forever or never finishing because
...

An alternative to tape backup is disk-to-disk backup with rsync.  I
maintain a package called dirvish, a perl wrapper around rsync, which
you can find at http://www.dirvish.org .   Rsync uses hard links to 
minimize needless duplication of data, and moves only the changed 
portions of files the network.  Thus, I can back up 100GB of data 
on 7 systems on my network (including two systems 3000km away) in
about an hour every night.  Because I am extra paranoid, the target
backup drives are in USB2 hot swap cages, and get swapped to a 
fireproof safe every few days.  I can generally get about 100 full
(hard linked) images of the 100GB on a 300GB backup drive, and so I
have backups, every day the last 3 years, on 12 hard drives in
offsite fireproof storage.

Dirvish is used to back up thousands of systems, ranging from 
small same-machine backups to large clusters like the Oregon State
University Open Source Labs, hosting kernel.org, mozilla.org, and
other major open source projects.  

Dirvish is very well tested and stable.  There are other rsync-based
backup disk-to-disk systems that are also worth a look.  Consider 
packing away those tapes and tape drives, and moving to denser,
cheaper, faster media like commodity hard drives.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs