BACKUP MEDIA
If you are looking for a backup device, you will find that there are many different types of devices utilizing different technologies on the market today. Selecting the correct device will save you a lot of time and money in the future because you won’t need to do many upgrades. In the complex world of computing, by far the most important item on a computer system is the data stored within it. Whether the data on a computer system is used for business purposes, or if the data has significant personal value, backing up data is extremely important.
Just as selecting the proper backup software is important, selecting the proper storage device matters. When selecting the storage device, the features you must take account of, are:
- size
- portability
- durability
- security
Optical disc
A recordable CD can be used as a backup device. One advantage of CDs is that they can be restored on any machine with a CD-ROM drive. In addition, recordable CDs are relatively cheap. Another common format is recordable DVD. A DVD can hold 4.7 GB (single side) and 9.4 GB on a double sided DVD. You can store even more data if the data is compressed. This makes it both feasible and practical to make security backup of a hard drive on only a single DVD with a DVD data and copy product.
Longevity for this storages producers defined as 100 years on good storage conditions. In theory it can work decades.
If a CD/DVD player fries, the storage would be inaccessible until you buy a new player. But this device can be bought everywhere. So the accessibility to this storage can be ensured almost all the time.
HDD
The capacity/price ratio of hard disk has been rapidly improving for many years. The main advantages of hard disk storage are low access times, availability, capacity and ease of use. External disks can be connected via local interfaces like SCSI, USB or FireWire, or via longer distance technologies like Ethernet, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel.
One of the first things to look at buying a backup storage device is how much date or items along with the total size of the hard drive you are going save to your backup storage device. If you have a 40 Gig hard drive, then it is recommended to have at least the same size storage. Even if you only have to backup storage of 20 Gigs of data, I would still recommend this for a minimum because you will fill the storage drive pretty quickly over time. The best condition is to see double size of the hard drive for backup storage device that way you have lots of space to play with and you won’t outgrow the storage device as fast and have to delete and make space available.
Longevity: normal use eventually can lead to a breakdown in the inherently fragile device, which makes it essential for the user to periodically back up data onto a separate storage device. Failure to do so can lead to the loss of data. While it may be possible to recover lost information, it is normally an extremely costly procedure, and it is not possible to guarantee success. The meantime between failures of SATA drives is usually about 600,000 hours (some drives have rated 1.2 million hours), while SCSI drives are reputed to last 1.5 million hours.
Flash
The most popular type of USB flash memory is the USB stick, or USB flash drive. Ranging in capacity between 64 MB and 8 GB, these devices offer high data capacities as well as high data transfer speeds. These devices are best suited for creating backups of important data, and for copying files between computers. Another type of USB flash memories is the flash memory card. Ranging in capacity between 64MB and 2GB, these cards allow you to store data and transfer it to your computer. This media type has two disadvantages: slow media read and write speeds, and the requirement for a card reader. Like all flash memory devices, flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure. Mid-range flash drives under normal conditions will support several hundred thousand cycles, although write operations will gradually slow as the device ages. Flash drives are much more tolerant of abuse than mechanical drives, but can still be damaged or have data corrupted by severe physical impacts. Improperly wired USB ports can also destroy the circuitry of a flash drive, a danger in home-built desktop PCs. These devices are relatively costly for their low capacity, but offer excellent portability and ease-of-use.
Tape
Using a Tape backup drive will allow for backup of large volumes of data for companies and individual users. The tape backup solution method is today the one which is often used, despite that it takes longer time than to copy data directly to a backup disk.
Tape backup technologies have to keep up with the ever increasing capacity of disk drives which is an alternative and attractive way to backup and secure data with.
These devices can connect via a printer port, USB and Firewire along with the network. The reasons for its inconvenience is the cost involved and the life span of the tape or drive and the fact that you have to keep changing tapes and have a place to put the tapes when not in use. There are some advantages of using these systems but it benefits more for larger systems that have large amounts of data and users.
Network
This is a good way to back up more than one computer and it gives an actual remote file service that anyone can access in the office. It will cost a little more than a standard USB hard drive but it might be worth just having extra file and folder storage place. Another note is that can do this same setup with a USB hard drive, just purchase a network router that offers USB print and drive connections as well as standard network ports.
Online-internet
Having an online backup system will save your day, should your premises ever burn down, or the fireproof box containing your backup disks get stolen.
The easiest means of backing up online is to set up a leased line to a remote server, and transfer data to it at the interval you think appropriate. This requires extra hardware and is an obvious non-starter for a company that works from only one site, but luckily there are various third parties.
Online Backup Services work in basically the same manner. You rent server space and, subject to a few terms to keep obscenity out, upload anything they wish. You can restore online, or by paying for a CD of everything you have stored on the third party’s server. Compression, wizards to help manage your backup files, and encryption are all standard services. The companies themselves are unable to unencrypt your data so your security is not be compromised. They usually employ military-strength encryption so that even if your files are intercepted in transit they remain indecipherable.
Most are able to upload only elements of a file that have been changed instead of the entire file. This is particularly important in corporate environments to avoid bandwidth problems. Many have virus checking as standard, drag and drop interfaces are becoming increasingly popular, and many online backup companies allow backups to be resumed if the connection is lost.
Some things to be aware of are online backups. Some companies will only allow for one initial complete backup of a hard drive, but as the time taken for the first backup of even an average PC can exceed 24 hours this may not bother you. Portability between systems can be an issue in some cases. So far, no online backup companies have found a way to backup files that are in use at the time.