|
When is the last time you backed up your important computer files or images?
Thought so. Most people have plenty of excuses for not backing up their files.
It’s too hard, too complicated, or too confusing are the common complaints—until
the day comes (and trust me, at some point it will come) that a hard drive fails.
Would you like to start over from scratch after losing all your photos?
Back-up used to be a royal pain. Floppy discs were slow and held very little,
tape drives were expensive and difficult to work with. Few people had CD/R drives,
or for that matter a second hard drive. Today though, there are a number of
fast, easy and affordable options available to keep a safe copy of your important
work.
Hard Drives
The simplest option of all is often an external hard drive. Available with USB
2.0 or FireWire connections, external hard drives offer the advantages of huge
capacity, speed, and convenience. With some, such as the Maxtor One Touch, you
can initiate a back-up simply by pressing a button on the external drive.
The Maxtor One Touch (www.maxtor.com)
is available in capacities up to 300GB. With a cost of about $1 per GB, this
is a very affordable choice. The Maxtor drives come with a copy of Dantz Retrospect—one
of the best back-up programs available. You can configure Retrospect to make
copies of files, folders, or entire drives on a pre-determined schedule. Or,
by pressing the button on the drive you can start an immediate back-up.
You can also choose to back-up only those files that have been modified, thereby
greatly reducing the amount of time required to make subsequent back-ups.
The SimpleTech SimpleDrive (www.simpletech.com)
is also an affordable and high quality external drive, featuring USB 2.0 or
USB 1.1 and FireWire connectivity. The unit is available in capacities up to
400GB. SimpleTech includes StorageSync back-up software with their drives.
You might consider adding an internal hard drive to your system as well. The
absolute best in data safety is a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives)
configuration. This takes a minimum of two identical drives which are treated
as either one larger drive (i.e. two 250GB drives appear to the computer as
a single 500GB drive) or as single drive that has duplicate copies of everything.
In this configuration, every time a file is saved, it’s saved to two drives.
If one drive fails, you can replace it with no data loss—the system will
immediately duplicate itself to the new drive.
If you’re working with multiple computers, or if you prefer to have
your external storage in a different location than
your computer, network storage is the way to go. SimpleTech offers the excellent
Network Attached Storage device. These drives connect to your system with a
standard Ethernet cable and can be shared between multiple computers such as
a Macintosh and Windows PC for transparent access to images.
They are available in capacities of up to 400GB and can be linked to provide
over one terabyte of storage if you wish. A secondary but extremely nice addition
is their ability to be used as a USB print server. No more moving printer cables
from one machine to the other!
| 
