\_ I've heard good things about BRU, but haven't used it.  You will probably
\_ want something better than tar.

Although the vendors have probably solved this, with tar, you know
what is on the tape, and can take it anywhere.  I just had a qic-150
from the last millinea (ah, the good ol' days) dumped and it came out
smooth as glass.  If you don't compress the archive, you can (I
believe) even recover recoverable files from a corrupted archive.

You may or may not have these abilities with other tape archiver
beasts.

tar is ugly, and you'll have to write your own management interface
for it.

BRU && Amanda prolly have some gui that helps you make good decisions
easily.  

David