Ok, I must admit, this doesn’t happen to me that often, but once in a while I find myself in a very sad situation where I knew I should have backed up my data, and yet I failed to do so. There are many different options on the market for backing up your data such as tape drives – really expensive enterprise solutions for such purposes that you’ve probably heard of or dealt with. I honestly don’t see myself or any of my friends using them at home for different reasons, so we wouldn’t talk about those today. The second most popular option would be DVD recordable/rewritable media. Even though it’s not a bad choice per se, however the limited capacity makes them somewhat obsolete, especially considering the exploding size and affordability of hard drives. Mind you, their descendants, Blu-Ray media, look very lucrative, provided that we take constantly dropping price in consideration along with their much bigger capacity. Having said that they have their own shortcomings – I guess all of us had an experience with a CD or DVD that just wouldn’t work one day. It’s even more alarming when it was working for a decent amount of time in the past and then it suddenly stops working….
Other option would be using other hard drives to keep the backups. Doable? – Yes! Easier to manage? – For sure. Faster? – You bet. But it comes with a price.
One recent addition to this list is remote online storage services. They free you from the hassle of setting up all the hardware – all you need is a high speed internet connection and understanding that being almost effortless, you can’t dismiss the fact that it’s still a service, so it may go down and you also depend on your high speed internet provider for both capacity and availability.
I guess in essence, the choice is yours. Important criteria to consider: amount of data that needs to be backed up, cost of hardware, recordable/rewritable media (if used), accessibility, cost of energy.
Tags: Hardware