Any ideas? (Tape, cluster, etc)?

How mission-critical is it? What are you backing up?

Backing the server up to itself (a second HD) is always great (and inexpensive). To take it further, have a backup server also backing up that server (and all your others) with a RAID5 array: a 4x120 array that only uses 3 drives with the 4th being on standby in case a production drive fails.

You could get a second backup server too, if you wanted to. And put it offsite.

Just ideas...

Thanks for the input Allera. This is for all client sites. So far, we have RAID on all of our servers which we monitor very closely. It is definitely not NASA mission-critical like, but I am quite 'paranoid' with uptime and security.

This backup is intended for the last layer of protection in case everything else failed.

Btw, have you ever had anything failure? (I've had my IBM drive failed at least twice already).

Get a backup server running RAID5 then, and make nightly backups (a great program to use is rsync, only backs up files that changed so it doesn't copy over everything).

We had a motherboard go bad on one of the servers. It wasn't fun. The backup drive went with it somehow. We now have a temporary backup server in place while the real one is built and configured.

Wonderful! Thanks a lot Allera.

(I'm always open for any other inputs).