We got rid of tape several months ago, utilizing removable 250gb hard-drives in a 4 drive external SATA II tower and a separate NAS.

We use imaging software to get a fresh image of each server on the weekend, then incrementals throughout the week at one hour intervals. The images are created on a 1.5TB NAS device which can hold mutliple weeks of data. A copy of the base (full) images are copied to one of the removable drives, its popped out and sent offsite (weekly). The hourly incrementals are created on the NAS with a copy moved to another one of the removable drives and transmitted electronically offsite on a daily basis.

In case of a disaster, if we can grab the current drive on the way out the door, we stand to lose no more than the current hours worth of data. If not, then we may be out 2hrs depending if the offsite synch has completed. For normal backup functionality we have hourly snapshots of our data for file restoration which takes only a few minutes (<5) with the hard drives vs considerably longer with the average tape restore.

Granted our storage needs are modest by most standards, but with the size of SATA drives now over 750GB, its a good solution for many.