> Hmm those don't look too expensive. But are they any more reliable than regular
> hard drives? What about tape backups? Does anyone use those anymore?
>

External harddrives are fast, reliable, portable and convenient. They are just as reliable as your regular hardrive as long as you're not throwing them around or dropping them. Chances are next to nill that both your data (regular HDD) and your backup (external HDD) will die at exactly the same time. A HDD can save several backups and be erased and re-written time and again.

CD's / DVD's are error prone, unreliable (media/drive quality dependant) and still quite limited in capacity (in comparison to a harddrive). You have to store them under very specific conditions to get even a few years life from them. If you have more than 1 disk of data to backup then spanning over several disks can be a pain - same with restoring data from a spanned backup - especially if you just need to extract 1 file. If you use inexpensive -r's then you need to use new disks for each backup adding to the landfill.