Backup Hardware
Reliable Data Protection
Your choice of data backup hardware depends on the amount of data you need to keep for your business. Reliable, backup system hardware is the most important feature. Data backup has evolved greatly over time and the best hardware option today is the external hard drive. If you have not read
Data Backup Strategies,
we suggest you go there now to determine what you need in terms of equipment and size.
Before we discuss external hard drives, there are a other options you can use for your backup hardware:
Backup Hardware can be as small and as uncomplicated as a "thumb drive/memory stick" that you plug into a USB port and drag and drop data files onto it. When finished, unplug the drive and take offsite for storage. They range in capacity from 512MB to 8GB and are relatively inexpensive. Most likely they are not large enough for business needs. They are extremely convenient when transferring files between computers in different locations.
CD/DVD Rewritable Drives are another option for backing up small amounts of data. A CD can hold 700/800MB of data while the typical DVD can hold 4.7GB. There are CD's that you can write only once to such as a CD-R or CD+R and there are CD's you can format and write up to 999 times such as a CD-RW or CD+RW. These optical drives are a very stable, inexpensive storage system for small amounts of offline storage.
External Hard Drives have very large storage capacities and typically range from 60GB to 750GB. The cost per Gigabyte of storage capacity goes down as the drive capacity increases.
To determine how large a back up drive you need, simply go to
My Computer, right click on Drive C Icon, left click on Properties. Check Capacity, (Size of Drive), Free Space, (Space not used), Used Space, (All Programs and Data), to find out how much of your hard drive is Used and Free. When I use external hard disk drives for backup I create a folder for each day of the week the office works, typically five. I then multiply the Used Space by ten. This gives me the size of external hard disk drive I need for backup over the next 3-5 years. For example, if you have 40GB of Used Space on your hard drive now, 5 days of backup would take a 200GB drive. Allowing for a 3 to 5 year growth in data a 400GB drive would be the best choice for your drive. I also recommend having two backup drives. One drive is left in office and is backed up nightly while the other drive if offsite. Once a week you swap drives and you will have a total of 10 days backups to restore.
For complete network security, we recommend all servers run with a minumum of RAID level 1 plus an effective offsite data backup strategy.
There are quite a few Brands of external hard drives on the markey today. We use Western Digital and Seagate drives most of the time.
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