I'm looking into building a dedicated back up system because as far as I know, there are no consumer level backup solutions. Am I wrong? Are there tape backups that don't cost a fortune and handle terabytes of data? What I am seeing are $1000+ USD drives for 400gb which is what I'd consider the starting point of useful capacity. It looks like I could get a bunch of hard dives and be able to have a set of drives I can rotate through as if they were takes for less money than a drive and a couple sets of cartridges.
Tapes are not and have never been consumer-oriented, though of course there's nothing stopping you from using them. I think the best solutions to use, unless you're dealing with tens of terabytes or more of data, are probably much simpler - use Time Machine (or some equivalent for your OS of choice) pointed at a NAS drive, Drobo, RAID system, or whatever you prefer. Or, indeed, an external enclosure for a single drive and weekly snapshots that you rotate. Even something like Amazon S3 + JungleDisk is a decent choice if you have decent bandwidth.
We have an old PC that we slapped Ubuntu on and added a 320GB drive for a total of 400GB and about £50 tops. Shove it in a cupboard and set up a VNC server on it, then use cwRsync (assuming you're on Windows) and point it at the server. Also: Build your own Linux server cwRsync allows excellent syncing if you can understand it (I can't, my Dad did the programming for me to use it ) or DropBox allows syncing over the web I believe, so as long as your server is connected to an always on router or similar that should be ok
