We've used Colorado 5GB tape backup drives for about five years. Two of our network computers have them, so we alternate them, one late each night, for automatic backups. I verify successful backup first thing each morning. Every two days I change the pair of tapes.
Out-of-machine tapes are taken home every night. I suggest you *do not* leave all your backup recordings in one location.
Zip drives and RW-CD's won't (or wouldn't used to) carry the 1.5 gigabytes we want to back up every night. When we set up our Colorado systems, there were no alternatives.
The Colorado drives are getting old, and I understand they are (or soon will be) discontinued.
I'm hoping we can keep these 5GB tape drives going until RW-DVD's hit the market. They would have plenty of capacity, and probably would be faster & more reliable than the alternatives.
In any case, I urge everyone to backup every night. In five years, our tapes have saved us twice, when we had catastrophic hard drive failures.
One crash is all it takes to wipe out your entire order history & customer database. Reloading enough of it to be meaningful would take months, and would cost many times the price of the best backup system.