Do you really think that he's trying to backup and restore apps or databases? He's trying to make sure his diary and nudie pics don't get lost. 10-15 years ago i was storing naked pics of girls in gifs, and they're still readable (tho maybe not tasteful). Tape would work for longevity, and if it comes down to the hardware - just dont throw it away. We're not talking about a crazy enterprise situation where the farm is getting cycled. We're talking about some boxes in this guy's garage. If the data is important to you and the storage mechanism holds it - dont upgrade. just keep that box around w/ the tapes.

Was it 20+ years ago that you tried virtualization? If you can get VMWare ESXi going (have the hardware, that is) it is *just* like local, especially if you setup virtual networks. I guarantee you'll see faster speeds between two vnics than you could ever get out of a gb switch. And having to wait 5 seconds? Maybe if you've got 32 vista vms running on a single core p4... But personally I run 2 vms and the host just fine on my less-than-epic core2duo 4600 w/ 4gb of ram. And by 'just fine' i dont mean crysis testing, i mean real world usage of apps like Firefox/outlook. The real bottleneck is IO, as someone pointed out above. With snapshotting backups are ridiculously easy to implement and recover, and as such I have my vms on a simple raid 0 stripe. If it dies oh well, I have backups and worst case it takes 35minutes to completely reinstall. A coworker went all out and striped his across two raptor 10ks. I'd venture to say his VM's run faster than my native os (with no vms running). As long as you're not on id's team and using these VM's to test the nightly Rage builds, anything w/ HyperV or whatever built in is excellent in terms of performance. Hell, my year old t61 runs crappy vista w/ an xp guest and both run as best they can. (Actually, the xp guest is faster lol)