Page 2: Removable Hard Drives, Tape, Strategy, RAID, Conclusion
Removable Hard Drives:
Removable hard drives have really come into play when the USB mass storage standard went into force with the flash drives. Since the drive would work on pretty much any computer, you could tote around a huge piece of storage between many computers. The other good thing is that a hard drive should be more reliable than flash memory. It is true that a hard drive can fail abruptly due to mechanical errors that flash does not have, but generally the hard drive is much more robust in terms of erase/write cycles than their flash counterparts. You can purchase drives that store whatever the current internal hard drives store. Look for new terabyte drives to come soon. With this much space as a backup solution, you can potentially store multiple days of backups on one piece of media.
As with flash drives, you are taking an increased risk of data loss due to the media being integrated with the drive itself. Even so, a removable hard drive will provide a good backup solution incase of a failure. Also, unlike flash drives, you can really work while the drive is attached to the computer. When searching for a removable hard drive, make sure that the drive can be adequately cooled. Many removable hard drives fail due to excess heat that cannot be dissipated. Higher end units will be made of metal and will come with fans for extra cooling support. This is very important since hard drive do get very hot with high use. I also suggest that if you are going to use a removable hard drive for a backup, treat it as a backup. Do not use it as a second hard drive. Copy the data to it and unplug it. Backup media should be just that and should be ready in case of a problem with the primary location of the data. It would be terrible if you are using the drive that data is backed up on while working on the computer and a virus gets in and deletes everything. Yes, this does happen to people. This is also the reason that RAID is not a backup solution. I will go more into that later.
There have been new kinds of removable hard drive solutions that have really interested me. The Rev from Iomega is basically a hard drive in a cassette. You can treat this just as you would a hard drive, but in any event if you are backing up data, do not. The Rev drive is great for people that want a tape-like solution. You can really just leave the media in the drive. When I say media, the rev disk is basically just a hard drive platter in a case. It really is an elegant solution. The entry cost for this solution is much more than a couple of regular removable drives, but you get increased integrity.
Tape:
Tape has been the best backup solution for computers that serve companies for the past 30 years and continues to this day. No other medium to date has the capacity to rival a tape cassette. There are individual tapes that hold over 1TB and even more with prices very low for the amount of space you can backup. The drawback to tape is that the reading and writing is very slow compared to any of the other backup solutions. The primary use of tape is for overnight backups of an extremely large supply of data.
Tape is generally not suited for the home or even small business use if the data size of the backup is less than a few GB. Once you are backing up more than 70GB or so, it may be beneficial to start transitioning to tape for price and integrity issues. Modern tape drives and cassettes can outlast any of the other storage medium listed in this article and is a great solution for set and forget it type backups. Pop a tape in and let the job batch up and remove it the next day and stick a fresh tape in. The simplicity is the same as a Rev drive. The difference is that a tape cannot be used for anything other than backup or restores. Rather, I should say you would not ever want to use it for other than that. Tape has no random access. If the data is on the other end of the tape, you will wait awhile to get that data you want.
Tape drive technology is beyond the scope of this article and will be presented in a follow up at a later date.
Another Computer:
Many forms of data storage fall under this category. Use of a NAS is a perfect example of backing up to another computer or device. A NAS is a network attached storage device. Most NAS builds are implemented with full blown computers, but there are some consumer grade products that can get the job done for home use. The same caveats of a removable hard drive apply plus the added burden of making sure that all this data is backed up as well.
The major point for the use of a NAS is the ease of backing data up. Instead of having to backup all the different servers and clients individually, you can force them to use the NAS for their data storage and back the NAS up in one shot. This is great for recovery if a problem happens. You can pair NAS devices together to form a SAN (storage area network). A SAN is beyond the scope of this article, but can provide a business with fault tolerant, high availability storage.
Home users that do backups to another computer on their network must also be concerned about things such as power issues and disasters such as fire. Just having data on two locations may not be enough to protect yourself if a fire hits your home. Also, during a lightning storm, both computers can be knocked down for the count and without any other backups, what are you going to do? The basic point is to make sure that you have a sane backup strategy.
Backup Strategy:
This article is really focused on the home and small business crowd. I will refrain from discussing things such as incremental or differential backups and such and stick with a normal 'copy everything' type backup.
When making a backup strategy, it is important to determine how often you want to back data up. To determine this, you have to gauge how much trouble it will be to back data up against how much of a problem if the data is lost since the last backup. A typical home user would backup things every two weeks or so. There are times when people will backup things daily in instances such as writing a term paper or other very important document. You do not want two weeks of work down the drain due to a hard drive failure.
For simplicity, we will say that a weekly backup is fine and that we will be using a combination of a removable hard drive and optical media. Since the removable hard drive is the easier way to back things up, each week you would copy all the files that you would want to keep (or are important) to the removable hard drive into a folder labeled by the date. This way you could have multiple copies of data just in case something happened during one week. Things do happen, so keeping multiple backups is important.
Now that we have the weekly backups all said and done, a backup to optical media would be a smart thing every few weeks. Perhaps every four weeks, you would burn a DVD or CD of the data you need to save. Doing this step is very important for one single reason. What if a fire happens in your house and your only backup is contained in the house? Yes, this is a problem. Placing a backup on an easily portable and inexpensive media allows you to move the backup to an offsite location. Basically, when you create the optical media backup, take the disk to work and leave it there. The chances of both buildings having disasters are fairly minimal. There are even online services that will backup your data for you, but I do not trust anyone else with my data and neither should you.
You can tweak the basic strategy to suit your needs and depending on the amount of storage space you need and the availability, you could potentially do automatic daily backups and have it become second nature. Another thing to test is restoring all the backed up data just to see how it works out. There are software programs that allow you to basically backup entire drives so you could just load up from when your last backup was. I do not suggest doing this unless you know your software (meaning OS and drivers and other stuff being critical to the computer) is functioning perfectly. Backing up the data that you need should be more than enough.
RAID:
Repeat after me; RAID is not a backup solution. RAID will provide fault tolerance. A typical home computer that would use RAID would come in primarily two types: RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 (striping) provide no fault tolerance at all is only for performance use. If you are using RAID 0, chances are you are backing up your data regularly. You should be if you are not. RAID 1 (mirroring) takes two drive and basically mirrors the content on both of them. You lose half of the space you would otherwise have had. RAID 1 may seem like a backup solution because both drives contain identical copies of data on it, but it is not. I will go back to the example earlier in the article about a virus. If a virus comes in and delete files off of your RAID array, that change will be mirrored across the array and your data is now gone. RAID does not provide backup! There are many other types of RAID that will be covered in another article at a later date.
Now when your friend says that he is safe when he does not backup his data because he is using RAID, you can tell him he is wrong and why.
Conclusion:
I hope that you appreciate how easy it is to backup that important data that you cannot afford to be without. Backing up data is often overlooked, but very important. The process can be simple if planned correctly and when done, a very important tool in your data integrity arsenal. What are you waiting for? Backup that data now!
Be sure to check out follow up articles coming very soon and remember to enter our monthly forum contests!
Removable hard drives have really come into play when the USB mass storage standard went into force with the flash drives. Since the drive would work on pretty much any computer, you could tote around a huge piece of storage between many computers. The other good thing is that a hard drive should be more reliable than flash memory. It is true that a hard drive can fail abruptly due to mechanical errors that flash does not have, but generally the hard drive is much more robust in terms of erase/write cycles than their flash counterparts. You can purchase drives that store whatever the current internal hard drives store. Look for new terabyte drives to come soon. With this much space as a backup solution, you can potentially store multiple days of backups on one piece of media.
As with flash drives, you are taking an increased risk of data loss due to the media being integrated with the drive itself. Even so, a removable hard drive will provide a good backup solution incase of a failure. Also, unlike flash drives, you can really work while the drive is attached to the computer. When searching for a removable hard drive, make sure that the drive can be adequately cooled. Many removable hard drives fail due to excess heat that cannot be dissipated. Higher end units will be made of metal and will come with fans for extra cooling support. This is very important since hard drive do get very hot with high use. I also suggest that if you are going to use a removable hard drive for a backup, treat it as a backup. Do not use it as a second hard drive. Copy the data to it and unplug it. Backup media should be just that and should be ready in case of a problem with the primary location of the data. It would be terrible if you are using the drive that data is backed up on while working on the computer and a virus gets in and deletes everything. Yes, this does happen to people. This is also the reason that RAID is not a backup solution. I will go more into that later.
There have been new kinds of removable hard drive solutions that have really interested me. The Rev from Iomega is basically a hard drive in a cassette. You can treat this just as you would a hard drive, but in any event if you are backing up data, do not. The Rev drive is great for people that want a tape-like solution. You can really just leave the media in the drive. When I say media, the rev disk is basically just a hard drive platter in a case. It really is an elegant solution. The entry cost for this solution is much more than a couple of regular removable drives, but you get increased integrity.
Tape:
Tape has been the best backup solution for computers that serve companies for the past 30 years and continues to this day. No other medium to date has the capacity to rival a tape cassette. There are individual tapes that hold over 1TB and even more with prices very low for the amount of space you can backup. The drawback to tape is that the reading and writing is very slow compared to any of the other backup solutions. The primary use of tape is for overnight backups of an extremely large supply of data.
Tape is generally not suited for the home or even small business use if the data size of the backup is less than a few GB. Once you are backing up more than 70GB or so, it may be beneficial to start transitioning to tape for price and integrity issues. Modern tape drives and cassettes can outlast any of the other storage medium listed in this article and is a great solution for set and forget it type backups. Pop a tape in and let the job batch up and remove it the next day and stick a fresh tape in. The simplicity is the same as a Rev drive. The difference is that a tape cannot be used for anything other than backup or restores. Rather, I should say you would not ever want to use it for other than that. Tape has no random access. If the data is on the other end of the tape, you will wait awhile to get that data you want.
Tape drive technology is beyond the scope of this article and will be presented in a follow up at a later date.
Another Computer:
Many forms of data storage fall under this category. Use of a NAS is a perfect example of backing up to another computer or device. A NAS is a network attached storage device. Most NAS builds are implemented with full blown computers, but there are some consumer grade products that can get the job done for home use. The same caveats of a removable hard drive apply plus the added burden of making sure that all this data is backed up as well.
The major point for the use of a NAS is the ease of backing data up. Instead of having to backup all the different servers and clients individually, you can force them to use the NAS for their data storage and back the NAS up in one shot. This is great for recovery if a problem happens. You can pair NAS devices together to form a SAN (storage area network). A SAN is beyond the scope of this article, but can provide a business with fault tolerant, high availability storage.
Home users that do backups to another computer on their network must also be concerned about things such as power issues and disasters such as fire. Just having data on two locations may not be enough to protect yourself if a fire hits your home. Also, during a lightning storm, both computers can be knocked down for the count and without any other backups, what are you going to do? The basic point is to make sure that you have a sane backup strategy.
Backup Strategy:
This article is really focused on the home and small business crowd. I will refrain from discussing things such as incremental or differential backups and such and stick with a normal 'copy everything' type backup.
When making a backup strategy, it is important to determine how often you want to back data up. To determine this, you have to gauge how much trouble it will be to back data up against how much of a problem if the data is lost since the last backup. A typical home user would backup things every two weeks or so. There are times when people will backup things daily in instances such as writing a term paper or other very important document. You do not want two weeks of work down the drain due to a hard drive failure.
For simplicity, we will say that a weekly backup is fine and that we will be using a combination of a removable hard drive and optical media. Since the removable hard drive is the easier way to back things up, each week you would copy all the files that you would want to keep (or are important) to the removable hard drive into a folder labeled by the date. This way you could have multiple copies of data just in case something happened during one week. Things do happen, so keeping multiple backups is important.
Now that we have the weekly backups all said and done, a backup to optical media would be a smart thing every few weeks. Perhaps every four weeks, you would burn a DVD or CD of the data you need to save. Doing this step is very important for one single reason. What if a fire happens in your house and your only backup is contained in the house? Yes, this is a problem. Placing a backup on an easily portable and inexpensive media allows you to move the backup to an offsite location. Basically, when you create the optical media backup, take the disk to work and leave it there. The chances of both buildings having disasters are fairly minimal. There are even online services that will backup your data for you, but I do not trust anyone else with my data and neither should you.
You can tweak the basic strategy to suit your needs and depending on the amount of storage space you need and the availability, you could potentially do automatic daily backups and have it become second nature. Another thing to test is restoring all the backed up data just to see how it works out. There are software programs that allow you to basically backup entire drives so you could just load up from when your last backup was. I do not suggest doing this unless you know your software (meaning OS and drivers and other stuff being critical to the computer) is functioning perfectly. Backing up the data that you need should be more than enough.
RAID:
Repeat after me; RAID is not a backup solution. RAID will provide fault tolerance. A typical home computer that would use RAID would come in primarily two types: RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 (striping) provide no fault tolerance at all is only for performance use. If you are using RAID 0, chances are you are backing up your data regularly. You should be if you are not. RAID 1 (mirroring) takes two drive and basically mirrors the content on both of them. You lose half of the space you would otherwise have had. RAID 1 may seem like a backup solution because both drives contain identical copies of data on it, but it is not. I will go back to the example earlier in the article about a virus. If a virus comes in and delete files off of your RAID array, that change will be mirrored across the array and your data is now gone. RAID does not provide backup! There are many other types of RAID that will be covered in another article at a later date.
Now when your friend says that he is safe when he does not backup his data because he is using RAID, you can tell him he is wrong and why.
Conclusion:
I hope that you appreciate how easy it is to backup that important data that you cannot afford to be without. Backing up data is often overlooked, but very important. The process can be simple if planned correctly and when done, a very important tool in your data integrity arsenal. What are you waiting for? Backup that data now!
Be sure to check out follow up articles coming very soon and remember to enter our monthly forum contests!