Backups are important to all aspects of life. Whether it's backing up your computer to protect it's files, backups are important. There is a saying among information technology (IT)
professionals that "backups are never important until you need them." There is
a hidden meaning in this because no nightmare can exceed the horror of
realizing you cannot recover from a backup. Reliability is important
because a data owner wants to have peace of mind that they can recover
information when they need to. Speed is critical because many business
operations run 24 hours and some backup solutions need exclusive access to a
file. And efficiency is important because you want to get as much data on a
backup medium as possible yet the backup medium should be small enough to be
easily carried and stored offsite.
But you would be very surprised to find out how many
overlook data backups or have poor backup strategies to an extent where they
might as well not have a backup. Overlooking backups probably occurs more often
in the personal arena than it does in business although it does happen in the
latter too. Just ask any personal computer (PC) tech about how many times he or
she has replaced a hard disk drive for a customer but was unable to restore the
customer's files because of no backup. And the walls of an IT shop would tell
stories of not being to recover important data because it was never planned in
their backup strategy. Yes, they did backups, but not the folders that were
needed at recovery time.
Two popular backup methods are the
external
hard disk and the tape backup.
Tape backup
standards have been around for many years and only in the last few years
have external hard disk standards been developed and both standards are still
evolving. Each type of backup has its advantages and disadvantages.
External hard disk backup devices in recent years have become
a very popular, efficient, and reliable form of backing up data. For example,
you can buy an external hard drive that is mounted in its own unit with 300
gigabytes (GB) of storage and is connected by a USB cable making it a very fast
data transfer connection. The beauty of the external disk backup device is it
is like having another drive in that no special software is needed to copy
files from the source disk drive to the target external disk drive. The best
part is you can buy one of these units at prices ranging between $100 and $200.
Tape backup has been around for over three decades and it
has proven to be very trustworthy by businesses for just as long. Tape has the
advantage of being able to store high densities of compressed data on small portable
media at a very cheap price per one GB of storage. An extremely important
aspect of tape backup, when it comes to a business continuity of operations and
security plans, is the ability to easily store tape backups at an alternate
location. You never want to store backups in the same location as your main
computer. That way if a fire or some other disaster knocks out the main
facility, you still have the backups so that you can recover at another
facility.
With tape backups it is also easier and more cost-effective
to do redundant backups. The idea behind redundancy is that you will not depend
on any one piece of media should that piece of media fail (and they do). It
gets more expensive when you try to achieve data redundancy with multiple
external disk drives although in theory you could do this too. Just make sure
that where you store these drives at the alternate facility is
environmentally-controlled.
With all of the affordable solutions offered for backups
these days, there really is no excuse for data loss.
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