Medium that can hold more than 1GB are recommended. There are also other low cost alternatives which are less convenient as they cannot hold as much information. Although these drives are less expensive than the MO drive, cost per MB of the cartridge storage is higher than the MO cartridge. The multimedia workstations hard disk size are in GB range, the only viable system backup solution is digital tape drive. In contrast to the secondary storage, tape drive backup can hold more than 2 GB of files and can be used for regular backup for the whole system.
Tape drive backup is more time-consuming than the secondary storage solution suggested above.
Tapes are useful for regular system backup but not practical for saving files that are being work on because individual files are not randomly accessible like on hard disk or secondary storage. Color printing may still be required. For text printout, there is no significant, noticable difference. For graphics intensive work like multimedia, the number of gray levels a 600 dpi printer supports is very distinguishable. For creating quality multimedia programs, Macromedia's Director is the most popular and powerful tool of choice.