Mini Review: External Hard Drives for Backup
Backup our data is one of the more important tasks we should do everyday. There is many software available for this purpose and many Podcasters, bloggers, and vidcasts talks about it all the time. With this in mind, there’s one thing we should all care about, where to backup? There number of online backup services is growing fast; you have idrive at www.idrive.com, mozy at www.mozy.com, carbonite at www.carbonite.com, and ibackup at www.ibackup.com among others.
But the most common solution is backup to an external hard drive, whether you have a PC or Mac is your file what matters the most. Most people I know don’t have any backup system in place, and regrets come when files are lost. Almost every hard drive company have some sort of external drive, most hard drive companies are encasing small drives in hard enclosures to backup on the go. But the best solution comes with the type of user you are.
Enclosures are popular with people that do lots of back up regularly, most of the people with these types of needs are content managers. If you are in the video, photography, or commercial printing business more likely you are backing up lots of information all the time. In the video industry, not the high end, just people like wedding videographers, small advertising agencies, among others, use external storage devices and get filled pretty fast, video podcasting is also covered in this types of content management agencies.
For these types of business companies like LaCie has a line of Ethernet disks that allows them to swap disk fast when they get full, but LaCie is not the only one. Companies like Iomega, Wideband, Maxtor, and HP have their own versions of network attached storage (NAS). Flexibility is what you should keep in mind when buying this type of solutions, also be careful with your budget, one of these NAS can run for about $1,000 without the
drives.
On the go drives are also popular, same companies mentioned before have solutions like LaCie’s Silverscreen, Maxtor’s OneTouch, and Seagate PocketDrive, among others. Generally all these options are good, prices will vary on space available. These portable drives are generally more expensive than regular ones. Some comes with extra protection, like rubbed enclosures etc. My personal opinion is that you don’t want drives that are too small or you may end up loosing them. The perfect application for these portable drives is people that needs to transfer big amount of files between places, print artist that work on Photoshop or similar software may be an example user.
Regular enclosed drives is our last product review in this article, the most popular I’ve seen around is Maxtor, Western Digital, SimpleTech, and Seagate. All of them are good, some people may differ on which one is the best but the application on your environment may make the difference. Your options are either USB 2.0 or Firewire, some computers may even be able to boot from these drives, you can find these drives from $.99 cents a Gig and up. Buffer size, RPM, and drive size are the factors that will drive your purchasing decision. Be smart as I have notice that electronic stores like Best Buy like to put on sale this drives almost every week.
From my experience the software that comes with some of these drive are not all that good. You are going to want to review your software and test your backups to determine which is the best for you. Also some of these drives have a one touch backup button that does not work all that well. Some people have never had any problems with this automated solution but other had issues. If you are a Mac user you already know that the next OS release, Leopard, will come with a backup solution that will need a secondary drive or external drive to work properly.
Regardless of what your operating system is, backup all your data, all the time. Losing your data is not fun at all, now if you do have a hard drive gone bad, don’t just throw it away. There is multiple software available in the market for hard drives data rescue that you can use to recover what you may think is lost. Spinrite from Steve Gibson at www.grc.com is the best solution that I heard of so far. For more information on any of the products here discussed email me at lumencreativegroup@gmail.com, visit our forums or leave a comment on this post. Thanks.
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