Data Backup Mediums

Introduction

Everyone who owns a PC tends to store
personal data on it from time to time. Sometimes, this data is extremely
important, such as family pictures, legal documents, etc. You'll be surprised
to hear that even in this day and age, people still do not have any form of
backup for their important data. In other words, if their hard drive fails or
the computer gets destroyed, they're data is usually gone as well.

In our previous guides, we discussed various programs that
can do the back up for you, but this time we're going to focus on the actual
backup mediums. We'll cover most commonly used products for data storage from
which you can determine which one is best for you.

Let's assume for a second that we all have a single computer
with a single hard drive and no means of backup. All of our important data is
on that single computer drive. We need a way to back it up, so what would be
the easiest?

Starting Simple

What's better than one hard drive?! Two! Having 2 hard
drives in your computer will provide some additional backup in case either
drive fails. This setup requires that you either stay on top of your regular
data backup, such as manually dragging over files anytime they're created. You
can get around this schedule by using a dedicated backup program. This program
can run in the background and constantly back up the data for you.

Having 2 or more drives is your basic start for data backup.
Of course, the more drives you have the less likely data loss can occur.
However, if you have 4 hard drives in your computer, which is in the basement
and the house floods, most likely all 4 drives will be destroyed. This is a
less likely scenario, however depending on how important your data is, you need
to make sure you have other means of storage as well. A simply electric short
can cause problems for any computer and damage multiple devices at the same
time. These tend to happen a lot more frequently than floods.

External Drives

Now, what if you can't simply add another HDD? Suppose there
simply isn't enough room or connections in your case to do so? Most laptops can
only house just one drive. What do you do in that case?

You can purchase external drives. Basically, they are just
like regular hard drives except they're packed in a tight, aesthetically
pleasing enclosure and they generally come in USB format, something that all
computers easily offer. External drives come in large capacities as much as
4TB. They usually come with their own power adapter, but some small pocket
drives only require a USB cable, as they can run simply of the USB power.

The advantage of having an external drive is that even if
something bad happened to your PC such as flood or electrical damage, your
external drive will likely be in another location unaffected by these issues.
You'll have a good backup of your data and thanks to USB versatility, it can be
transferred to and accessed from any computer you want. On the downside, it's
easy to lose external drives, especially if they're small pocket ones. Because
it's not connected to the system all the time, you're also less likely to
perform backups frequently, which means you may lack most recent data. Of
course, combining this solution with an additional of an internal hard drive
simply increases your data security.

We can also group the USB Drives into this category as well.
Basically, your typical flash drives that carry, 4, 16, 32 and even 64GB nowadays
can be perfect tools for some backups, as well as data transfer from one
location to another. Don't plan on keeping your data on USB Drive too long
though. They are easy to lose, can occasionally fail and can also easily be
stolen. Same thing goes for other Mass storage drives such as SD cards,
microSD, CF and other types of formats. These devices, while able to hold data
for a long time, should not be heavily relied on to maintain sufficient data
backup. Use them for transfers, but avoid long term backup of important data
and personal documents.

Writeable Media

CDs/DVDs/Tapes and similar devices continue to be used as
backups, however due to the increasing data size of programs, games and other
applications, they aren't as practical as they used to be. Plus, this kind of media
is easily scratched or damaged, making the backups corrupt or lost altogether.
Tapes are still commonly used in business environments and they work really
well, however there aren't many useful consumer solutions out there. There also
other issues with burning media such as data integrity, faulty discs, etc.

Network Solutions

What if you have multiple computers at home? Several
laptops, perhaps even a few desktops? You'd like to utilize the space these
units provide, but you don't necessarily want to remove the hard drives from
the systems and install in your main computer. If all of your computers are on
a network, you can backup data to a shared drive. These drives are treated
similar to a secondary hard drive, so you can configure your backup programs to
regularly offload data over your network.

The benefits to this method is that it is pretty quick,
especially if your network is completely wired. If your network is mostly
wireless, you could see slower transfer speeds. Occasionally, due to the
reliability of wireless connections you could get data drops and corruption. If
you perform regular backups over the network, you definitely want to have all
the devices wired in, rather than wireless. If you only transfer small amount
of data occasionally, then wireless connection will do fine.

Clouds

Many online services offer Cloud storage. Basically you
upload your data to their servers via your web browser or a dedicated
application. Some cloud storage services are free, but typically have a low
maximum limit of about 2GB. If you need to store more than 2GB of data, you may
need to purchase a monthly account that will allow you to upload more data. The
great thing about this service is that your data is secure in completely
different location. However, it's only accessible to you if you have the
internet connection and as long as that company is up and running with their
servers.

Also, depending on the importance of your documents, you may
not want to simply upload them to some other company for safe keeping. If your
documents contain important confidential information, it's best saved at your
home, possibly in a safe, on an encrypted hard drive.

Conclusion

These are the most common methods of data backup today.  You can choose to do any one of them, or you
can do them all. It all depends on how important your data is to you. Data such
as family pictures and videos can be difficult to re-create, so you want to
make sure you don't lose those. Confidential data can be re-created, but you probably
don't want it in anyone's hands but yours, so external drives and safes will be
your best combination.