In today's world, I feel they have basically one purpose: BACKUP and RESTORE.
Tape Drives normally have a drive that connects to either a serial or a parallel port on your computer.
The capacities of each tape cassette vary greatly from about 680 MB to 4.4GB (8GB migration path) and more.
I would recommend a tape drive as a backup device for anyone with a network server, and for desktop PCs which have large hard drives. The cost is not prohibitive, $200 to 600.00., and the actual cartridge/cassettes are only a few dollars ($25.00 to 35.00). It is a cost effective method of backing up your system, but it is very slow.
One of the problems you may encounter is that many current tape drives have drivers for DOS, Windows95, but do not work with Windows NT due to lack of drivers.
An alternative might be a IOMEGA JAZ drive (1 GB per cartridge) or a SYJET (1.5GB per cartridge) - they are faster, but their capacity per cartridge is lower; and their purpose was not a backup device.
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