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Mississippi | There was a bit of a discussion about this in some other threads lately. Here's my 2-cents:
* USB hard drives are fine as long as you know that every hard drive eventually will fail, so backing it up to a hard drive of any kind can't be your sold backup. You need critical data on a CD or DVD that you've actually tested once you've burned it.
* SATA drives are faster. If you've got gobs of data, look into SATA. You'll need to install a SATA card to interface with a SATA drive - internal or external - unless you've got a really new computer with a SATA port already built in.
* The most critical data should also be stored off site in some form. For a while, we backed up some things - accounting, data bases and such - on CDs and put in the safety deposit box, but we weren't disciplined enough for that to be reliable. I signed up with backup.com for that. This automatically does backups that you can schedule at night. If you have dialup, it makes the connection and interacts with the off-site server. If you have a 24/7 broadband connection, it logs onto the server and does the backup. The first backup takes a while. After that, you can set the system up to backup only the changed files. As I understand it, backup.com mirrors my data in two sites in different parts of the country. If you have a problem, you can go onto the company's site and retrieve your data or pay them a nominal fee to send it to you on DVD or CD. We've never had to do that, thankfully. But during tornado and hurricane season (we're in the southern half of Mississippi) I don't worry about losing my big data bases or 7 years worth of QuickBooks.
Owen | |
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backup hard drive
