Ideas for backing up 500Gig external drives?

I was wondering if folks have hardware products they are using to backup large external disk drives. I have 3 500 Gig LaCie drives hanging off my iMacG5.
I would think with larger and larger capacity drives becoming available to the general public, this should be driving the need for tape backup solutions of some sort that have a high enough capacity to get the job done.
As the consumer class macs have no slots for SCSI or fibre cards, what kind of backup hardware are folks using?
Also what brands of firewire hubs are folks using to plug in these drives to their systems? (I use a belkin 6 port with power).
PowerbookG4   Mac OS X (10.4.6)   iMacG5(10.4.6)

Hi, planetwc. Welcome to the Discussions.
If you're looking for Mac-compatible tape backup solutions, look at Exabyte. They have a couple of tape drives that use FireWire. Not cheap, but they work.
EMC Insignia Retrospect (nee Dantz Retrospect), the Backup and Recovery solution I use is the only one I know of that supports backup to tape.
As to FireWire hubs, one is about as good as another. You're correct to use a powered hub. However, I strongly urge you to implement a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and power your Mac, the FireWire drives, and the hub through such. A power outage can have the same effect as disconnecting or powering-off a FireWire drive without first Ejecting the drive: corruption of the partition map on the drive.. This would then mean resorting to data recovery techniques, such as I address in my "Data Recovery" FAQ, to recover the data from the FireWire drives.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

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