Tape backup is still pretty common in the private sector. They have 1.6TB tapes now. It can be a good solution for offsite backups of large amounts of data, and best of all it's super cheap. I don't know why anyone would use tapes at home, though, unless they were running a business from there.

Yes me and a few friends had these to swap games 😀 I went with one from IOMEGA and also got some sort of turbo floppy controller which doubles the speed.

I remember the noise it made. It also had to go back and read a section again so I never really trusted this technology.

Soon after that I switched to a parallel Zip-100 and just took it with me when I saw my friends.

I never had a zip drive.... I jumped on the CD-R bandwagon instead. I remember paying $350 for a 2X drive (and that was on sale). But, at the time, that was simply miraculous. I only had a 1275 Mb drive, so I could back up the whole thing on two discs. And they "only" took 40 minutes to burn 😜

MOTOR on (gw-)basic(a)
without the help file, for years i always wandering what are that for.

I just recalled another memory.. back in the good ol' BBS (and expensive HDD) days, there were several "elite" boards in my area that had more files than their meager hard drives could hold. They used software that allowed for offline files to remain listed in the file sections, and if you wanted any of them, you'd have to submit a request and wait for the SysOp to reload something from tape. It could take days -- a tortuous wait when you really wanted to play a certain game. 😁

WOW - at one time I actually had a VIC-20 that used one of those cassette recorders 😜

Used to use a parallel ZIP 100 drive until it bit the dust. Still have a QIC 120 driver that connects via floppy but it's never used. Has Windows NT 3.1 support too (woo).

EDIT: Oh and my Power Mac G4 has a ATAPI ZIP 100 drive.

I had a friend, when I was 14 who I lived right next to. He used tape backups too. But then again, those were the nineties, where the cracker groups. Had their rain with cracked game collections, about every month (on CD) *whistles". Such as Silverado, Hybrid, and even Phrozen. Anyway, yeah he used those tapes to certain stuff. So yeah, even though I did not have a PC, or stuff like that. I can remember tape backups, and stuff like that. And yeah, even big game companies used tape backups back in the day. Such as Acclaim and so forth.

ncmark wrote:

WOW - at one time I actually had a VIC-20 that used one of those cassette recorders 😜

Ah yes, I remember the old statement of Press Play on Tape 😁

One of the older servers at my job has a tape backup drive. I don't ever remember the staff using it in the 6 years I've been here. It's some kind of blue-ish, periwinkle colored Dell if I recall correctly. I'll have to check the case and see what model that is. At my previous job back in 2001, they had some kind of laser barcode tape "squares." If you could make a Chunky candy bar out of green, square plastic, these would be it. I'm not sure what exactly those were called. I used to load tape games off my uncle's Commodore 64. As they say, "It was rad." 😀

Edit: found the server type. Dell Pentium-III Poweredge 1400SC

ncmark wrote:

I never had a zip drive.... I jumped on the CD-R bandwagon instead. I remember paying $350 for a 2X drive (and that was on sale). But, at the time, that was simply miraculous. I only had a 1275 Mb drive, so I could back up the whole thing on two discs. And they "only" took 40 minutes to burn 😜

I never messed with tape drives... too expensive, too slow
I got a 4X panasonic SCSI CD-R when it got to around 200 bucks... shortly before then I got an ATAPI Zip drive and used the crap out of it... between school and friends... still was my primary portable storage/backup after I got the CD-R drive because media was so expensive!

I recently got an ultra-SCSI Dell OEM tape drive from a poweredge server for free... it's within 3 years old... I don't use it though

I still have a SCSI tape drive at work... actual SCSI, with an Ultra-320 PCI adapter in the host, terminators and all that.

It's just an AIT 20gb drive... we don't use it for backups anymore, but keep it around so we can read old tapes if we need to.

The parallel port Zip 100 was hands down my favourite storage device. I had this little case and in it went I went to friends to swap games and copy stuff. Everything had a parallel port and you could even install Windows 95 and 98 from it 😀 The driver was also super easy, just running GUEST.EXE and that was it!

Terrific product. Man what if someone manages to build like a CF card type ZIP drive through the parallel port. That would be awesome 😀

Still use Parallel zip for dos PC's to transfer files before I get the network up. which happens quite often when I decide the best fix it to start again

I knew a place that use VHS tapes for backup. 😜 Quite a novel idea if I do say so myself.