Looking for a tape drive

[hackett@gaul.csd.uwo.ca (Mike Hackett)]

With all this discussion about tape backup software, it seems that this
would be a good place for me to ask for recommendations on hardware units 
for the GS.  There's been a lot of people talking about software but I've 
not seen any mention of specific hardware (I may have joined the thread 
late, however).  

Here's what I need - I would like to backup at least 250 Mb of info, from
two different drives, on one tape.  If I can more storage (either through
compression or higher capacity) for not a lot more, that would be great.
I don't really care about speed, but it has be able to fit on one tape 
so that the backups can be done unattended as I plan to run this every 
night.  I want to do weekly full backups and daily incrementals. I suppose,
if it came down to it, the weekly backups don't absolutely have to be 
unattended, but it would be preferable.  My actual setup is a GS with a
105 Mb drive and a Mac that will soon have probably about a 150-200 Mb
drive, available to the GS via AppleTalk.  So the tape drive and backup
software should run on the GS.  I have a Apple SCSI board (new one), if 
that makes any difference.

I'd like an inexpensive solution (I need 10-15 tapes, so that should be
included in the initial price), but a reliable one.  Backups are useless
if not reliable.  I picked up the latest Computer Shopper as it had a
special feature on tape drives, but it didn't tell me a whole lot.  I
looked through the whole issue and only found two ads with had external
SCSI drives.  Almost everyone was selling these Colorado drives, which
are cheap, but they are designed to run off an IBM floppy card, and I
don't know if they could be adapted to run off a GS.  Even if they could,
I'd have to write my own driver, which I'm not really interested in doing
at this time.  So I think an external SCSI option is my best bet.

I would really appreciate it if anyone who's done a bit of looking around,
or who's very pleased with whatever they are currently running, could let
me in on what you know.  For that matter, I'd also like to head from
people who are not all that happy with their setups, so that I can be
aware of problems, too.  Of course, recommendations on mail-order 
distributors would be appreciated as well.  Apart from TMS, I've never 
seen any Apple II dealers advertising tape drives.  Post in 
comp.sys.apple2.marketplace or reply via email.  Thanks very much.  I 
really appeciate it.


=====================================================================
Mike Hackett                  | "Ignorance and prejudice
<hackett@gaul.csd.uwo.ca>     |  and fear walk hand in hand"
Honors Computer Science grad  | -Neil Peart, "Witch Hunt"
University of Western Ontario |           - _Moving Pictures_ (Rush)