High capacity backups

[Bruce Allen]

I am thinking about buying a high-capacity tape drive.  There seem to be
two options: 8mm exabyte for $1800 or 4mm hp DAT for $1500.  The first has
about 1.5 Gig capacity (I am told) and the second about 1 Gig.  Two
questions:

1. Is one of these two tape devices better, faster, more reliable?

2. Is there any good window based software that I can use, not only for
   backing up partitions but also for backing up useful directories that I
   don't want to keep around.  This would let you search through directory
   trees easily, etc.  Something a bit nicer than restore -i.