Backup Hard Drive

Backup Hard Drive of your home computers is very critical if you have lots of valuable and critical files you do not expect to loose. Replacing the broken parts of the computer such as Memory, processor, power supply, or monitor is not a big deal – you have money you can purchase the defective parts replacements. But loosing your valuable and critical data due to hard disk failure is big disaster. See also Autoloader tape backup solutions for medium to corporate class businesses.

Backup Hard drive is not just to prevent in case of hard disk failure, loss data or corrupt data due to the Internet viruses and Trojan horse attacks could be possible since the threats from the internet have become an increasing risk. In a large corporate or business network, proper scheduled backup is performed centrally via network backup if they have lots of data servers to backup, but at home – it us to take care of the possible data loss or corrupt.

The need of Backup Hard Drive becomes critical, although we might not be able to provide absolute protection to the hard drive but we can provide some methods to backup hard drive to prevent data loss or corrupt. This will help us recover the data when the disaster occurs to the hard drive. See also business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

Using thumb drive or USB Flash disk

A very simple and easy solution is to backup hard drive is using USB flash disks. USB Flash disks today have various capacity and the capacity is getting bigger and bigger up to 8 GB storage – a huge storage for normally our private critical data only. Normally USB Flash disks are used as a convenient means of data transfer between computers. USB 2.0 standards can support data transfer rate up to 480 MB/s, which is a very fast data transfer we can use to fill the drive with data in a relatively short period of time.

CD/DVD Writers or Rewriters

The price of CD/DVD Writers are getting cheaper and the modern desktop computers are now equipped with this CD/DVD writers as popular accessories options for backup hard drive data. And mostly all brand new laptops have this type of CD/DVD writers as an option of data backup and CD/DVD media player.

The capacity of CD writer is about 700MB – not enough for a full backup hard drive, but that’s adequate space to store critical files you don’t want to loose. But for DVD writers, the capacity is much bigger as much as 5 to 7 GB data storage. Depends on how big your data to backup is, one or couples of DVDs would be sufficient for your normal critical data.

External Hard Drives

Another method to backup hard drive data is using external Hard Drives, an easy to transfer data backup using USB, or Fastwire interface. The capacity of external hard drive can vary from 80GB up to 300 GB or more, a huge storage to do a large volume of full data backup. If you are using Windows XP/Vista you can do a schedule backup using backup strategy transferred to this external hard drive as the target storage.

External USB Hard disk would be possible as central network backup for your small network environment at home or SOHO connected to the wireless router which has USB port designed for external hard disk or USB network printer such as WRT610N Linksys wireless router.

Additional Hard Drives

Installing the second hard drive in the computer system is a common method of backup hard drive. By having the second hard drive in the desktop computer (we cannot add a second hard disk into the laptop) allows us protect the data loss by regularly copying from your primary hard disk (normally drive C in Windows) to secondary hard drive. You need to understand technical things inside the computers to add a second hard drive into it, things like installing the rainbow cable and insert it into the enclosure.

In a corporate server, multiple SCSI type had drives are installed in RAID configuration for a much better level of security and redundancy. A RAID 1 or normally people say Mirror Hard drives – needs dual similar size hard drives. With RAID 1 array in place, if one drive is faulty and die – the system is still running by providing the alert system to the user telling that the hard drive is faulty. RAID 5 would common configuration for backup hard drive in a business or corporate server allowing multiple SCSI hard drives configured with one hard disk is used special for parity purposes. Total capacity of the hard drive would be (N-1) with N is the number of disks used in the RAID 5 configuration.

Check out previous articles:

• business firewalls
• and also networking routers.
• Local area networking topologies
• WAN services technologies
• Spanning tree protocol