The REV drive is available in 35 and 70 GB flavors, but you need the eight-disc REV loader to setup automatic daily backups.

What do you mean you can't take HDD's to an offsite location?
External hotswap bay > take the drives out > take them with you.

If you use a decent RAID controller like Areca units, you don't even have to remember to put the drives back in the right order when its time to restore/update the backup.
Wether a backup solution works well or not is more dependant on the software you use with it then the actual media.

why would you use this and not removeable IDE or eSata, aside from the software ?

it seems expensive compared to a 300 GB SATA or R-IDE solution.

First of all I wouldn't touch ANY Iomega product with a 10 foot pole. I still won't buy another IOMEGA product since their "Click of death" problems from their crappy Zip drives.

OK, so the math:

A single 750GB Seagate drive is $400.00

A single 280GB IOMEGA "Backup Solution" is $1200.

So for 3X the storage and 1/3 the price you can get the Seagate drive, pop it in a $50 external enclosure and it will be faster, smaller, quieter, AND last longer (Seagate's drive has a 5 year warranty vs. the 3 year warranty on the IOMEGA monster).

I don't have any clue why they are still in business with this junk.

Worse, I wonder why the reviewer is still so nice about it.
Why is it that I never see a review end with "This product belongs in a trash compacter."?

Some more math:

1x Addonics Storage Tower (1x Infiniband ML connector) > $150
4x Addonics Mobile rack II > $40x4
4x Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB > $500x4
1x Areca ARC-1110ML > $300

So for $2600 you get:
- 3TB external storage
- 300MB/sec transfer rate

You can backup 3TB in less then 3 hours at a cost of less then 90c per GB
And that's with a low-end hot-swap enclosure, you should check out sites like http://www.enhance-tech.com/ for professional solutions.

Iomega's offer:

1x Rev loader 280 > $1100
8x 35GB Rev cartridge > $40x8

That's $1400 for:
- 280GB external storage
- 17MB/sec transfer rate

it would take more then 4 hours to backup 280GB at a cost of 5 bucks per GB.
I don't foresee a good future for Iomega if they keep heading down this path.

As i see it, this is intended for business use only. You need a backup for every day, every week, every month and every year. A total set of approximately 25 media sets.

The author can live with not having a daily backup set, but any company with a vital database must be able to go back days, weeks or more.

Imagine a corrupt database that is first discovered some time after the the first errors. Or someone breaking in, and taking away everything, including the server and your HD-backup....

Can ATA drives be replaced every day without hardware failure?

This is ment to be an alternative to tape backup, wich is much more expensive.

What kind of validity does this position have?

If you start treating SATA drives (in hot-swappable cages) as the equivalent of a tape (just faster, cheaper and more reliable than tape), you would end up with off-site HDD storage instead of tapes. Tape has no advantage left, other than it is accepted by the masses as the defacto medium for backup. Tape only became the defacto medium for backup because it was initially cheaper than hard drives.

Your point of a corrupt database assumes that the hard drives aren't rotated like tapes, which one would do. Furthermore, your point about someone breaking in and stealing your hardware ignores the fact that the backup hard drives could just as easily be stored off-site.

DLT IV tape: ~$20 each, 40 GB capacity (uncompressed)
AIT tape: ~$100, 100 GB capacity (uncompressed) (If I recall correctly)
320 Gig HDD: $95 each, 320 GB capacity (uncompressed)

Where I work, we backup several TB a week, send out boxes of tapes for off-site storage. Both our "disposable" costs would decrease if we started using hard drives for backup as well as our physical off-site storage needs. The only reason we don't: Management perception of the defacto standards.

Furthermore, backups would take less time with hard drives as the medium. <edited for clarity>

I trust a HDD more then I do a tape.

I'm not saying that HDD's are more reliable then tapes but with HDD's I usually get a warning before they actually fail.
By using stuff like SMART you can do pre-emptive replacement of drives.
I've got a whole stack of drives here that I've labelled "unreliable" because they give SMART warnings.
These drives will not be used in critical applications anymore.

I seldom have a HDD suddenly die on me without warning.
Can you check in what state your tapes are in?
Or do you just wait until one refuses to work when you need it?

First off, this is a serious backup solution. I use a SCSI REV Autoloader to backup a network of critical accounting data daily. That was my trial REV installation. The hard drive based cartridges are much more reliable, and are much faster that magnetic tape. If you think I'm going to use a dinky external drive, it's not going to happen in a professional environment. I need to rotate backup media and take it offsite.

I've used tape backup way back to the 70's and the Rev stuff works pretty good. Occasionally I get a cartridge to hang. The 160MB SCSI LVD interface is speedy. I use an Adaptec 39160 card on a Supermicro dual Xeon motherboard as a backup server running Windows Server 2003 R2 and CA BrightStor backup software.

Yep, it's expensive but hey, IBM nine track tape machines were way more than these babies.

External drives are fine for the house, but this is the best solution currently in terms of speed, flexibility, and media rotation.

Pilotx,
Network guy in Texas.

Speed: How many tape drives can keep up with a HDD?
How many tape loaders can write to an entire set of tapes simultaniously like a RAID array?
Flexibility: HDD's come in all shapes, sizes and brands yet share thesame interface. (SATA, SAS, SCSI, fibre, whatever floats your boat)
Tell me, what else does your REV loader swallow besides REV cartridges?
Media rotation: What prevents you from sticking HDD's into hot-swap cages and juggling them around like tapes?

And the "fine for the house" comment:
dinky external drive?
That hot-swap cage looks allot tougher then a REV cartridge...

I absolutely love the HDD array, especially RAID 6 or 50. I have installed a lot of RAID 5 SATA setups lately on desktop PCs. It is a power hog however and the electric cost is a factor now in quotes that I do.

The REV works fine for most backup applications. I have dropped the REV cartridges and they keep on running. 35 gigs is plenty for the vast majority of databases and accounting backups. The cartridges are very small and fit into safe deposit boxes easier.

Let's don't go for absolute performance here just because it exists. Did that a lot in the 90's. Want dual Pentium Pro 200s on NT 3.51? Fine, write me a big, big check. Sometimes less is best and I have a budget to stick to for clients including looking at energy costs nowadays. I'd love to stick a six drive SCSI RAID 5 into everthing for security but that is just more for me to support and I am very expensive. The REV has shown to work better than tape and is economical. Rotate the cartridges, burn a DVD-DL, send everything offsite for safekeeping, and I can get the backup costs way, way down.

Wow serious LOL. I think you are missing the point. You've bought into another proprietary Iomega piece of crap. Yes, it works NOW.

We are pointing out that you can do the same thing with industry standard hot swappable drives in a less expensive manner and have better features, capability, and reliability.

PM me in 3 years and let me know how you feel about the reliability of this I hate to even call it "Backup Solution". I seriously hope I'm wrong for your sake.

I do agree with you that it's not always the cheapest solution.

I tend to prefer solutions with the highest bang-per-buck ratio.
For backup solutions the cost/GB ratio means allot to me.
And in that area the REV is not a good choice...

Unfortunatly the HDD way is rarely the cheapest in terms of absolute cost. (See my post "Some more math" )
The bigger you go with HDD's the better that bang-per-buck ratio becomes.
You don't buy a $500 RAID controller and $300 enclosure to stick in just 2 HDD's.
Then the HDD's become a very expensive option.
However when you figure it for 4, 8 or more drives you'll see that tape or REV cannot keep up in any category. (Cost, size, speed, etc)

In other words, REV and tape in general "doesn't scale up".