Getting a suitable backup solution right often relies on getting the right device, because that device will in turn determine your capacity, rate and the number of tapes required to backup your system.

Tape technology has, for a while, been behind the capacity of the drives on which we store the information, and I've always felt that on a busy disk you need at least it's current capacity plus about 25% to account for changed files.

With individual drives available in 500GB capacities, a milestone in storage is when we can store as much on a single tape as those 500GB drives. Even ignoring the singe drive capacity, it's not uncommon to see half, single or multi-terabyte storage arrays. Now Sun, through their StorageTek division, have achieved that native capacity (up to 1TB compressed) with the new T10000 drive.