In article ,
The Natural Philosopher writes:

I've had nothing BUT trouble with optical media

Strange - I've not had any problems with optical drives.

Down to the point where I have a variety of optical drives on different
machines that I can cross-mount to install stuff off them if I need to.

Then I discovered that you cant use a linux type filesytem on them, so
at best I could write one tar file.

Then i discovered that one tar file was too big..
then I discovered Id spent nearly as much on all those trashed optical
disks as....

...My backup strategy is simple now. Two hard disks, one server and rdiff.

If one disk goes, I will buy another. Endlessly.

My fileserver runs a pair of mirrored data disks.
For backup/archiving, I snapshot the data every night, which gives
me access to the files as they were at that point. That's used to
retrieve any individual files from yesterday, or any day -- as I've
never yet needed to delete any snapshots, so I can recover any file
at any date back over the last 2.5 years.
For disaster recovery, I attach a 3rd mirror disk, allow it to
resilver, and then detach and store off-site. Frequency of doing
this is variable, depending on how much work I've done.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]