Looking For Backup Data Storage ? Checkout Our Backup hardware Guide

We have a number of choices available to us, but first you need to decide on the following criteria .



How much data am I going to be backing up?, so how big does the capacity of my backup device have to be.

How fast is it to backup, will it take hours or minutes?

The types of backup devices available include

USB Pen or Flash Drives
The most common and cheapest way to backup files. USB flash drives have always come down in price as the sizes have increased, they now offer storage capacity up to 64gb, meaning size such as 8 or 16gb which is enough for most users files can be picked up very cheaply

CD Writer
USB Pen or Flash Drives
The most common and cheapest way to backup files. USB flash drives have always come down in price as the sizes have increased, they now offer storage capacity up to 64gb, meaning size such as 8 or 16gb which is enough for most users files can be picked up very cheaply

Cheap to buy, media is also very cheap, maximum size of 700mb per CD, for overall cost savings consider using re-writable CDs

DVD Writer

Prices have come down a lot over the past year, media has also come down in price, making this a great buy,

Single layer drivers offer storage up to 4.7gb .

Dual layer drives offer up 8.5gb which is great for your backup or hard drive image to DVD, as with CDs better to use re-writable DVDs for regular backup data storage .

Extra Internal hard drives
This has to be the fastest way for your backup data storage, hard drive prices are the best they have ever been, with sizes now in excess of Terrabytes, which can hold a real lot of data.

The only downside to this kind of back is , you are still carry all your eggs in one basket so to speak, although if the computers original hard drive fails, the secondary drive being used for backing up will be ok, but what happens if you computer gets stolen?

External Hard Drives
External Hard Drives have really come a long way in the last couple of years as USB has taken off, USB Hard Drives are really just IDE Hard Drives within a casing which converts the IDE interface to USB.

The disk sizes can be the same as an internal drive, its just much easier to setup, just plug in as long as you are using Windows XP or 2000 and thats it your up and running.
External Hard Drives come in a couple of sizes you can get the very small 2.5 inch cases which basically have a laptop hard drive inside, which draws its power totally from the USB port or the larger 3.5 inch type, which has to have a separate power source as the drive cannot draw enough power from the USB port.

A couple of points to bear in mind about external USB Hard Drives, the larger 3.5 inch drives come in larger and faster configurations than the 2.5 inch .

The 2.5 inch is much more portable and can fit in your pocket, also it does not need to plug into the mains. Portable backup data storage

Lastly make sure your computers USB ports are USB2 , there are two types of USB , just called USB1 and USB 2 .

USB2 is about 40 times faster than the earlier USB1 type, so if you wish to use a USB hard drive, and you only have USB1, you will have a very slow backup data storage solution.

You can always purchase a USB2 interface card, they are not so expensive and you can get them for both desktop and laptop computers.

TIP if your looking for a USB drive on a budget why not purchase the Caddy or Case and Hard Drive separately and make your own, its easy and will save quite a few bucks.

Tape Drives backup for mass data storage
The whole purpose of using a tape drive today is to give you a very large amount of backup data storage space on a removable medium, the larger tape drives are not cheap.

Anything under 8gb means its probably better to just go the DVD route, but like I said tape drives do offer huge amounts of storage space, but one with about 70gb capacity is going to cost you around $500 to $600 dollars.

Summary
So if your looking for frequent high capacity backup data storage solution with Under 8gb, the DVD dual layer option would be the choice, then simply have as many re-writable DVDs as you would like in your cycle .

For example if you backup every other day and you would like a cycle of 14 days, you would need 7 DVDs , just label them one thru seven and just follow the sequence.

If you are looking to have a very frequent live backup, say every few hours and both the data on your Hard Drive and on the backup device are almost the same due to the backup frequency, then the external hard drive route would be a good option for you.

If you are looking to create an easy to use backup template checkout our Windows Backup article.

Not sure what to backup or where to start your backup data storage ? checkout our main backup page, where we cover all aspects of backing up your system and files.

If your thinking of purchasing a USB flash drive for your backup data storage
Make sure you read on about hacked USB drives so you don't get caught out

computer adviser backup data storage article