[Belgian_Waffle]

Memorex once had a slogan which expresses what I believe is one of the 'first principles' of computers and computing. It is for computers what the principles of thermodynamics and gravity are to physics; and it goes like this: "There are only two kind of data: 1) Data that has been backed up. 2) Data that hasn't been lost yet."

With hard drives of 200gb+ now commonly being used in pc's (I have 3 drives of this capacity or greater in one of my pc's) there has been a tremendous gap in backup media to protect one's data. Whether you use your pc as a PVR or you are a digital artist or you manage ANY large amount of data, those handy-dandy 4.7gb recordable dvd's just aren't gonna do it. Forget debating about the relative sizes of various movie files. As far as your computer is concerned, anything on your hard drive is just "stuff". And if the only copy of that "stuff" is sitting on your hard drive....well, there are only two kind of data.

Hard drive capacity is increasing faster than the media available to back it up. By the time 25 and 50gb BD drives/media comes down in price, we will be using 700gb hard drives (ie:Seagate vertical stripe technology), so the only professional solution for backup is mirrored, or duplicate, sets of hard drives (preferably mounted in a separate dedicated 'box' to minimize data loss due to 'finger-poken').

That being said - for those of us with needs in the 200gb range, having access to 25 and 50gb backup media is manna from heaven.