Four Things You Must Consider When Backing Up Information

When selecting the type of backup solution and media that you will use, there are four main factors to consider. The importance of each varies from situation to situation. You may be most concerned with speed and reliability, while another person may be more concerned with cost.

Backup or recovery speed varies among systems. Online backup is the quickest because hard drives are faster when writing or reading data. You can retrieve data stored on media such as CD-R or DVD-R quickly but it takes far longer to write to them than to a hard drive. Tape drives take the longest to write and even longer to retrieve data.

B speed is your chief criterion for backups, consider installing additional hard drives in one or more of your systems and use them to perform online backups. An external hard drive works equally well and has the advantage of being removable for storage or transport.

Capacity

If you have a high volume of data to back up regularly, consider a large hard drive (internal or external) or a tape drive. Both of these have capacities of several gigabytes. DVD-R discs have a capacity of around 4.5GB, while CD-R discs have a capacity of 800MB.

For quick incremental backups, either a hard drive or CD-R/DVD-R discs would be ideal. Tape drives, depending on the system, can hold over 100GB, depending on the type of tape system. Tape cartridges cost more than CD-R/DVD-R media, but because of their large capacity they may be more convenient when backing many gigabytes of data.

Reliability

Reliability varies from device to device and among brands. Generally, a hard drive is less susceptible to degradation than tapes and some CD-R/DVD-R discs. At the same time, a hard drive has moving parts and can suffer mechanical failure.

The reliability of CD-R/DVD-R varies among manufacturers. I have had some discs fail after a year, while others are fine after several years. Rewritable discs are more susceptible to degradation than write-once CD-R/DVD-R discs, but again this varies among manufacturers, and from disc to disc.

Tapes seem to be the most sensitive to environmental changes, degradation, and mechanical damage. On several occasions, I have lost gigabytes of data when a tape drive "ate" a tape or when after a few months of use a tape degraded. The quality varies but in my opinion for the most reliable offline storage use write-once
CD-R/DVD-R discs.

Cost
In the last few years, the price of storage media and devices has plummeted. CD-R drives are available for less than $70 and external CD-R/DVD-R combination drives can be found for less than $250. You can buy blank CD-R discs for 19 cents apiece and DVD-R discs for as little as 80 cents each.

At the same time, the cost of large external hard drives has dropped and you can outfit a computer with an internal hard drive as large as 200GB for under $130.

Tape drives are by far the most expensive, largely due to the amount of automation they offer to the backup process. A tape drive that uses 10GB tapes can cost more than $700, with tapes as much as $20 each.

For the average user, the most cost-effective route is probably a CD-R/DVD-R combo drive, combined with online backup to a hard drive on the WLAN. Backup software is available to automate backing up over your network, and you can manually create offline backups to discs at regular intervals.

Backing up mobile device

It is especially important to back up your mobile device regularly to avoid losing data. The battery life of PDAs can vary from a few hours to a month or more, depending on the model and how much you use it. PDAs can also be lost or damaged, resulting in data loss. There are a number of methods available that you can use to back up data from your mobile device.