Backup Drives

Tape Drives

The slowest, but most economical backup medium is a tape drive. There is better support for tape drives and a number of software packages that will support a wide variety of devices. They are usually relatively simple to set up and allow you to maintain a reliable unattended backup. Tape capacity keeps getting larger to match drives that are equally growing is size.

Large Floppy Disk Drives

This would include the Zip100, Zip250, SyQuest EZ-135, the LS-120 floppy drive and others. These devices are ideal for file archiving and transferring, but not as suitable for backup. As hard disks increase in size trying to do backups to a device that is only a little more than 100 MB becomes impractical and expensive. These drives are very reliability although they are proprietary and not very universal. Their performance is increasingly getting better.

Removable Hard Drives

This includes devices such as Iomega's Jaz drive, SyQuest's SyJet or the mounting of a external USB, firewire or SCSI rack and carrier containing a hard drive. While Jaz and SyJet drives can be quite expensive with capacities 500 MB to 2 GB, removable hard drives may be the best backup alternative. A disk copying software tool or simple batch file running in a task scheduler allows for unattended backup. If both drives are removable and configured properly, recovering from a disaster may be a simple as switching drives.  Server software such as Microsoft Windows NT allows you to mirror drives. Should the primary drive fail with this utility you are able to remove it then reboot to the secondary drive as if nothing happened. Reliability and performance with removable hard drives is excellent while the drives themselves are non-proprietary. The cost associated with two removable hard drives is no more than a tape drive with the same capacity.

Dual Hard Drives

Having two hard drives in one computer works much the same way as a removable hard drive system. The drawbacks of this sort of scheme, however are more significant. First, it is not going to help much against theft, fire, sabotage, many types of viruses, and even some types of hardware failure. Second, you can only have a single backup, which makes the whole system very vulnerable--if you make a copy of the whole disk every night, what happens if you only notice a problem three days after it wipes out some of your data? Finally, the temptation is large to use the second drive for more data and discontinue the backup procedure when the first disk gets filled up.

CD-Recorder

These are write-once drives with a capacity of about 650 MB.  Despite the fact that the disks are not reusable, some people use them for system backups. The cost will discourage most people from doing backups often enough, but one advantage is that the backups are readable by any CD-ROM drive. Using a CD-R to do incremental file archiving would be a better use, because you can continue to add files. Once the files are added they can not be changed protecting them from corruption or viruses.

CD-Rewriter

These drives are really in the same category as the removable hard disk equivalents. CD-RW media is reusable, but as a backup medium, the 650 MB capacity is inadequate. Using a CD-RW to do incremental file archiving as with CD-R drives would be a better use, although it is one of the most expensive alternatives

Network Backup

For PCs on a network, backup over the network is a viable backup alternative. This type of scheme is sometimes used in small to medium-sized as a way of protecting PCs without the expensive of tape drives or removable storage. The idea to copy data from one PC to another over the network is simple. Duplicating each PC's information provides a way to protect each individual PC. This type of backup is  similar to in-place hard disk duplication in terms of how it works, except there isn't the same single point of failure in terms of virus attack or hardware failure. However, depending on the location of the two PCs, theft, viruses, disaster, corruption and sabotage can still be a problem. If you have more than two workstations on a network, the best backup would be to have one workstation backup files once a day and the other backup once a week. This would protect you from most concerns.

File Archiving

A supplemental backup method is file archiving. Making backup copies of files that are used periodically, in case needed later. When working on a documents over a period of weeks or months, the documents are changing far more often than the other files on your hard disk.  A disk copying software tool or simple batch file can make this process easier.  In case you make a mistake to a document or your program corrupts it, you can restore it by simply copying from another location.

Another practical use of supplemental backup is for system files.  Since most Windows problems occur within the registry copying your system data files can save you from a disaster. You can do this by copying the following files to another folder:

• C:\Windows\Win.ini

• C:\Windows\System.ini

• C:\Windows\Protocol.ini

• C:\Windows\User.dat

• C:\Windows\System.dat

• C:\Config.sys

• C:\Autoexec.bat

• C:\Io.sys

• C:\Command.com

• C:\Msdos.sys