OK... I was tinkering with an idea I had for work, and would appreciate any and all advice. Currently I have 19 servers backing up about 11-14 Gigs (compressed size) to a DDS3. As the files are already tar'ed before they hit the backup server, there is no compression going on at all. The problem being obvious. On compressed data, DDS3's only hold about 12 Gigs. There are times when I do NOT get a full backup. (It's OK, as the files I am archiving last are by far the least important.) Anyway, what I was thinking about was using removeable (Hot-swappable) hard drives instead of tapes at all. That way, restoring from tape would be exceedingly fast. As an additional plus, this SHOULD be a fairly inexpensive route for mass storage. I would need to use a total of about 15 drives for our current swap-out routine. My next question is: are there any products like this in existence? IDE is much prefered for cost/availability issues.

If yes, then that begs the question: Do they suck?

And finally: Am I just dreaming here.

I am more than willing to do the research, I just figured I'd post here b4 I wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to find a solution that doesn't exist.

Thanks.

Mason