Just made a few calculations : Here in europe exabyte Exabyte mammoth tapes are around 3.5 euros (same as $) per Gig, Firewire drives around 2.5/G !!! This is quite a shock as far as backup strategy goes. Of course tape retains an advantage as an incremental backup tool on the short term while project is active and maybe on the long term as far as conservation is concerned. food for thought...

well, in terms of incrementality (is that a word?), I believe you can specify a FW HD as your backup medium in Retrospect, no? -dave

For me FireWire works great as an incremental backup because it's fast, and I can actually open and run sessions from it to see if it is all there. But, as the old saying goes, data is only really backed up if it is on a non-hard drive medium. There have been many threads on this issue of backup formats of course, but I think that the NARAS (Grammy people) Producer and Engineer's Wing have made a good attempt at establishing standards for backup and delivery of masters. Here's the link: