Buy an External Hard Drive and Backup Gets Easier
A Backup Article Contributed by Melissa Larose
Buy an External Hard Drive and Backup Gets Easier
Hard drive backup is a foundation of a traditional backup plan. Recent technological advances now allow that hard drive backup to happen through an external hard drive and not through tape, CD's, DVD's, another server hard drive or computer hard drive. A backup to an external hard drive can be a cost effective and efficient way to backup important data. The ability to remove the external hard drive and store it in an off-site location can be a great alternative to some company's backup needs.
High end and expensive tape solutions may be a backup solution of the past for some innovative and progressive companies.
Hard Drive Backup Software
In order to implement the use of an external hard drive for backup, the software you employ must be sophisticated enough to take advantage of the hard drive as backup storage. Today, tape rotation strategies are built into most backup software. These types of strategies do not include the use of an external hard drive for backup but instead would consider each hard drive as a tape. Backup to tape would require far more tape as tape does not come in the large sizes an external hard drive does.
In this scenario, the software would need as many hard drives as tapes and this would defeat the purpose of using the external hard drive in the first place. Look for backup software that uses backup sets to achieve backup. These products will allow for an external hard drive to become your backup media.
When to Use External Hard Drive Backup
For many companies tape backup is still king. These companies have such a high volume of data to backup and protect that the convenience of tape, it's light weight and easy storage capability, outweigh the use of an external hard drive at this time. A hard drive has some weight to it requiring the consideration of all that weight when storing a large quantity of them. In addition, the delicate nature of a hard drive requires the handler to follow a certain awareness of the device.
Tape, although it does need to be protected to heat and magnetic forces, is lightweight and not as delicate. If you have ever watched an IT team work through a backup tape routine or a data restoration exercise, you will know that tapes are often slapped into a deck, dropped and handled roughly. A hard drive cannot endure this type of abuse. A hard drive is a mechanical device and is easily damaged.
Therefore, backup to external hard drive should be used by companies that can backup their entire set of data to one or two hard drives. Storage of several external hard drives is much easier and more practical to control than storage of dozens of them.
Hard Drive Backup Reminders
If your company fits into the external hard drive backup profile then you are really in luck. The price of these large size external hard drives is dropping daily. This means more cost savings for you and an efficiency of process that shoots sky high.
