I considered the same problem about 3 months ago. I went for the CDRW. If you have a lot of data to backup, or you're going to want to backup the entire machine, go for the tape. It'll be easier to backup a few GB on that. I just back up my config files, my data and home directories and a few other bits. I wrote a script which tars up all the files I want to keep safe and copies the archive to another machine on the network. This runs every night as a cron job. I backup that archive file to CDRW whenever I remember. I figured there's no point in backing up the entire machine - I have all the binaries etc on the SuSE disks and if it takes me a few hours to do a fresh installation after a catastrophie, that's something I can live with. As long as I have all the configuration files and all the data, I'll get it going again pretty quickly. The bonus of the CDRW route is, as you've noted, they are more flexible than a simple backup device. I wanted that flexibility.

I am nearly in the position to buy either a CDRW or a Tape drive and I am not sure which I should go for..

the prime aim, would be to back up my personal files and configuration data. I suppose that really, a tape drive would be the best option but I am acutely aware that CDRW's are now so common place (ish) that this medium would allow me to transfer file, create CD's and I presume, I could still tar my desired files to the CD rather than a tape ?

CDROM's are relatively cheap - Tapes are comparitively expensive

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