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There are a bunch of non-tape niche technologies for backup, including floptical disks, Bernoulli boxes, Iomega and SyQuest removable drives, and magneto-optical drives. Ignore them all; they're half-assed attempts to combine a backup device with the fast random access needed for working storage that don't do either job very cost-effectively, especially when you consider the (high) cost of their media. Only magneto-optical drives are likely to have much of a future, and that only given improvements in access speed.
Digital Data Storage (DDS) capacities are a good match for today's multi-gigabyte drives (this is essentially the same technology as Digital Audio Tape or DAT). I'm told that Hewlett-Packard DDS devices are especially good, not surprising given HP's traditional obsession with reliability and overengineering stuff. All the DDSs I know about are SCSI devices.
At the high end, 8mm helical-scan tape (the stuff used in Sony camcorders) competes with DDS. This is a single-source tchnology, from Exabyte. Capacities are 2.2 and 5 gig, transfer speeds up around 500Kbytes/sec. However, a correspondent says ``Don't touch Exabyte. I've got three. All three have been sent back for warranty repair at least once.'' He also says ``A significant expense can be the cleaning tapes. Exabyte is notorious for this.''