I found myself in a bit of a backup quandary recently after one of my office’s backup media became maxed out. We are using an Iomega Zip 250 with a daily 6 disk rotation for backups. That has worked fine until the staff began scanning a lot of documents. Now that 250 MB isn’t quite big enough anymore. So I had to decide what backup solution to change to.
I’ve setup Iomega Rev drives at a few offices, including one of my own. However, considering I would need to buy the USB starter version (which comes with 6 disks), I thought $500-600 a little pricey considering the office does not need near 35 GB of backup space any time soon.
A solution between these two extremes was what I was shooting for. Since I have personally used an Iomega 1 GB Jaz drive for about ten years without any problems with the drive (I had 1 of 4 disks go bad, but it was replaced under warranty), a 2 GB Jaz drive seemed a good fit. Unfortunately, these drives have not been sold new for a few years. So I decided to check eBay and found some really good deals. There are a lot of used drives and disks for sale, and even some new disks and drives available (still sealed in the box). Although it took a few auctions, I was able to acquire a new Jaz drive, 6 disks, and a SCSI to USB adapter (Jaz drives all had SCSI interfaces) for just under $200. If this works out for a few years, I think it will be a great deal.
In part 2 of this thread, I will talk about how the deployment of the drive goes.
Stay tuned.