Posted on 9th April, 2009 | | Under : Uncategorized
The best way to be sure you will never need a backup is to be sure you have one (Murphy’s Law of Data Loss)
We recommend multiple backups, preferably on different media and definitely in separate locations. It is highly unlikely two separate structures in different cities will burn down at the same time.
There are many options for backup:
All writable optical disks will eventually fail. We tell everyone to assume a 1.5-3 year lifespan. If you keep them in a fireproof safe, they will last longer. This will NOT protect them in a fire! Period.
Tape is the best long-term storage. Good for 30 years and it’s not continually spinning and wearing itself out like a hard drive. Very inconvenient and expensive to implement – and slow to operate – even slower to Recover.
External hard drives are your best bet from a convenience and cost standpoint. Have at least TWO – if not THREE backups of everything and in different buildings – preferably different Cities. Assume all your backups will fail and you will at least be prepared.
Only turn on your hard drives when you are using them. Power them completely off the rest of the time to dramatically improve their life span. We use special enclosures that spin down the drives after a short period of not being accessed.
Web-based backup is incredibly convenient, but frequently too expensive for very large amounts of data. If I had to backup the 800+ Gigs of photos I store (the quantity goes up every week) it would cost me a fortune.
There is a a difference in quality in hard drives. Not all drives are created equal. We use nothing but Western Digital drives. Best reliability and failure rate in the industry. In our experience, Maxtor is historically the worst. Period. We have had to recover lost data from more damaged Maxtor drives than any other brand. Second is IBM.
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