It looks like the HP DAT-72 USB drives work with Linux. With 36GB native capacity, they should work quite well for your application.
If you're willing to swap tapes a little more often, a DDS-4 drive (20GB native capacity) would save about $120.
Either way the tapes are around $10-$15 with the drive costing around $550-$750.
With tape it's important to always verify the backup immediately (most backup solutions offer this as an option), but it does roughly double the backup time (from ~2 to ~4 hours for this situation).
Also, always rotate media, since tape fails at roughly the same rate as disk (media MTBF), but it's a bit more silent about it. Rotating media not only prolongs media life, it also reduces the probability that a single media failure will result in catastrophic data loss. Running double backups can also help reliability (each backup is run twice, to two non-overlapping media pools), but it again doubles the backup window and also doubles the number of tapes used.
==Joseph++
chip33az@netscape.net wrote:
> Does anyone know of an inexpensive tape backup that works with Linux?
> Preferably external and USB. Speed isn't important, but backups are.
>
> I'm looking to backup my home "server" and using another drive just
> doesn't appeal to me. I also don't want to use DVD's as it seems like I
> would be using about 10+.
>
> I have about 50GB - 60GB of data to back up.
>
> Thanks for any guidance.
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