Last week we helped you make the data backup plan for your company. However, while you’ve come up with a plan of what needs to be backed up monthly, daily, weekly, and ever single time it’s edited, you haven’t figured out how best to back it up. When it comes to the different types of data backups, it can get really confusing. That’s why, this week, Working Nets has a guide to the different types of data backups available, and brief overviews of their advantages and disadvantages.
Magnetic Tape
Magnetic tape is an older solution and is rapidly losing relevancy in today’s technology. It can backup more, faster, then secondary hard drives, for cheaper, but it’s rapidly losing it’s slight edge in this department. Also, to backup and retrieve data from backup you have to run the tap sequentially. Which means you don’t pick and choose the data you retrieve, it has to all be retrieved, and then you sort through the data. However, for the time being, magnetic tape is the best for backing up large amounts of data quickly, and retrieving them quickly.
CDs and DVDs
CDs and DVDs are good as backups of individual large projects, large groups of small documents, and data bases. The most a DVD can hold is 17.08 Gigabytes as a double-sided, double-layer DVD. With a DVD and CD you back up individual files you want to save, photos, word documents, not entire systems.
SolidState Drives or Flash Memory USB Drives
Solid state drives, flash memory usb cards, sd cards, are devices that serve as a bridge between CDs, DVDs, and having secondary hard drives. They can store, and cost more the CDs and DVDs, but cost less and can store less then a secondary hard drive. They do have advantages over DVDs and a hard disk drive in that they’re faster at uploading and downloading information. Their solid state format is faster then the spinning disk drive technologies of the other formats. You can get SD cards that can hold a lot of data, but they start becoming prohibitively expensive and not as cost efficient when you get to the larger sizes.
Secondary Hard Drive Internal or External
The price of terabyte hard drives has plummeted recently, making a secondary hard drive an inexpensive and worthwhile investment for backing up all of your data. You can have a networked set up of multiple secondary hard drives to backup all data on your network, or single secondary hard drives per computer. They can be installed internally, or be external. External are a little bit more expensive, but are more readily portable then internal hard drives.
Remote Backup
A remote backup system is when your information is backed up off-site. This is normally done via the internet using secure encryption through a web service. The advantages of remote backups are that they are away from your office, in the event of a natural disaster such as a flood or fire, they are secure, as remote backup companies have high security protocols, and finally that they can be remotely accessed from anywhere as long as you have the login information and password. The expenses of remote backup plans can vary depending on the provider. The draw back is that most of the time these services are simply for backup and retrieval not working access. This means that while you can save something on a remote backup and retrieval but can’t edit the document from their service.
Cloud Backup
Cloud backups are like remote backups, except that everything is available to edit online. Cloud backups are nice for when multiple users are working on and editing a document, but this can also be their greatest vulnerability. If someone gets in and edits and saves the document, but you want the document as it previously was, you may not be able to get it to return to it’s original form.
With Backups Redundancy is your Best Bet
For protecting data, there is no better backup then redundancy. Keeping several backups, in different formats, means that in the event of one emergency or another, you’ll be more likely to be able to retrieve it and fix your problems.
Get Your Backups with Working Nets
Need help figuring out different types of data backup? Working Nets assures that we can keep your vital business data is kept secure if disaster strikes. We have knowledgeable experts on staff who can make sure that your IT needs are covered and that all of your information is safe. To talk to someone about data backup and recovery for your small business, give us a call at (443) 992-7394. We’d be happy to assist you with your professional business networking needs.
You can also visit WorkingNets.com and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+
