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Showing posts with label Backup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Backup. Show all posts

Friday, September 18, 2009

Backup

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Where to Back Up?

  • Disks - This is the least desirable option for two reasons. First, floppy disks do not hold very much. Second, they fail fairly often, and seem to do so just when you need them most. I tell people that they should never store anything important on a floppy disk. Floppy disks are for moving files, not storing files.
  • Drive - This is an excellent choice as long as you are careful about picking which things to back up. You cannot do a complete backup of your entire hard drive this way, but I will argue later that for most of us we do not need to a complete backup of our hard drive anyway. Zip drives are just one of several brands of large-capacity drives which hold 100-200 MB of data on a single disk. So if you have one of the other brands that will work out just fine as well.
  • Recordable - A blank CD will hold 650MB of data, and the disks themselves are cheap, as low as $1 a piece in quantity. If your hard drive is not too large, you could use several of these to a do a complete backup as well. If you want to look at this option, experts suggest that you stick to SCSI drives only unless you like making coasters. The drive itself will probably cost around $250-300 for a decent one, plus a SCSI controller card if you don't already have one, which can cost $50-100 more.
  • Tape - If you are going to do a complete backup of your entire hard drive, this is the usual way to go. There are people who need to do this. Usually, they are System Administrators backing up the hard drives of Network Servers. Most home users do not really need to do this. If you already have a tape drive, by all means use it for backups. But if you don't already have one, you might be better off buying a Zip drive or the equivalent.
  • Web site - Yes, there are now places online that will give you free storage space, often in amounts as large as 250 MB. This is great if you don't have any other option for storing your critical files. But news reports say half of all Dot.Coms will go out of business next year. What if one of them takes all of your backups with them when they go? I have never been able to convince myself that storing my backups online is really a good idea. There are companies that do this for a fee that are quite reliable, but they cost a lot and are aimed at corporate clients.
  • Network Drive - These days, more and more people have two or more computers in the home, and they are starting to network those computers. This is a great opportunity for a backup solution as well. If you have a server on your network, you can back up to the server. If your network is peer-to-peer, computers can backup to each other!
  • Second hard drive - If your computer has a second hard drive, backing up to that second drive can at least protect you against data loss due to hard drive failure. That is better than no backup at all.
  • Different directory - This does not give you much protection, but it does protect you against file corruption in the original files, including some types of virus infections. It is the most minimal protection, but better than nothing.

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