Data Backup Mediums

Backup mediums - Right from floppy to mirrored drive, lot of choices are available. But depending on importance of the data, you have to select the proper data backup medium.

Data Backup mediums - Do you know, one in sixteen computers face the risk of data loss. You have to select your back up medium carefully. Your choice and decision will depend on price, ease of use, portability and data reliability. There are lot of choices for backup mediums. Right from cheapest floppy to costly mirrored drives or Raid drives. You will have to own and maintain these data backup mediums. If you don’t want to own the medium, go for remote data backup. Whether you are a single-user or network user, you will find that the reliability and ease-of-use are the most important criteria’s for critical data backups.

Why should you backup your data?

As per Gartner group, one in sixteen computers face the risk of data loss? Are you ready for data loss? No way. It is your important data. It will affect you.

The best way is to take the regular backup. You should have some sort of backup plan. Depending on your application and budget, you can select your data backup medium. Let us check the data backup mediums one by one.

Floppy
Zip
CD
DVD
USB drive / Pen drive
External Hard drive
Tape drive
Mirrored drive (RAID drive)
Remote data backup (offsite data backup)

Portable data backup mediums

Floppy- It has capacity of 1.44 MB. Floppy is the cheapest backup solution but don’t use it. It is my request to you. They are not at all reliable. You will loose your data frequently.

Zip floppy- It is slightly bigger in size compared to standard floppy. It requires special drive. You can store 100 MB to 2 GB data. They are quite reliable. But drives are not very reliable. Iomega manufactures zip drives.

CD – They are very cheap. Price is approximately $ 0.5. They are quite reliable but you should handle them carefully. A single scratch on the coating may result in data loss. You can store up to 700 MB data on a single CD.

DVD – DVD are very popular due to drop in their price. It can hold 4.7 GB data. The price of a single DVD is approximately $ 4. The data transfer is fast.

USB drive – USB flash drives are compact and user friendly. You can carry them in your pocket or tie in a key chain. It employs latest digital technology, which results in ultimate portable storage. USB drives are pluggable and portable and give total freedom. It contains memory chips. Hence there are no moving parts. It is totally electronic design. Hence it is very reliable. Most of manufacturers give data retention of minimum 10 years. They are available from 16 MB to 2 GB range. Highly recommended for small and convenient data storage applications.

External hard drive – These are portable hard drives with USB interface. They employ same hard drive technology. However advantage is portable design. Some external drives are available with firewall interface. They are available from 20 GB to 120 GB. Maxtor, Fantom, Iomega are some of the manufacturers of external hard drives.

All the above data backup mediums i.e. Floppy, Zip, CD, DVD, USB flash drives are portable.

Fixed data backup mediums

Tape drive - They can read or write the data sequentially. They are available from few kilobytes to gigabyte range. Their speed is quite high. Some of the faster tape drives can transfer the data at the rate of 20 MB per second. Certance is one of the tape drive manufacturers, which uses industry-standard tape media. Tape drives are generally used in the industry for storage of huge data or in big corporations.

Mirrored Hard drive – There are 2 hard drives. One drive acts as a Master and other as a slave. Whatever data is copied on master, it automatically generates mirror image on slave. They are available from 20 GB onwards.

Remote data backup – It is maintained on remote server. In case of flood, fire or any other natural calamities, it is better to go for remote data backup. There are lots of service providers. Depending on your data size and budget, you can select your data backup plan. The most important thing is you don’t have to maintain any hardware. You can access it through the Internet. That means you can access it from any part of the world. You can schedule the data backup activity. Once it is set up, it will be totally automatic process, which will keep your data safe and give you peace of mind. If you compare the advantages and cost, remote backup is the best value for the money from the available data backup mediums.

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