Home Backup Strategy - Part 2 - Options

In part 1 of this article we looked at what problems we face when we look at backing up our personal information. We came up with the following options for our Home Backup Strategy:

• Large USB stick
• Another internal drive
• External hard drive
• Network Attached Storage (NAS)
• Online Backup

In this part we will go through the above options and look at the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

Large Pen Drive / USB Stick / Flash Drive

The largest capacity USB drives are getting up to 64 GB so they are viable for smaller backup datasets. Many Kingston USB drives come with a 5 year manufacturer warranty so they give you peace of mind that your data will be safe for a long period of time. USB 2.0 transfer speed is very good, so backups can be made quickly. USB drrives are still on the small side for medium or large backups and as the cost per gigabyte is expensive.

Another internal hard drive

If your computer has two or more physical hard drives then one can be used as a backup of the main hard drive. The positives about this approach are that transfering backups / restores is fast. The cost per gigabyte is very low. The negatives with this approach are that the drive is part of the same system so viruses could propergate to the backup drive or other problems with the system could affect the backup drive.

External hard drive

External hard drives give you portability that it close to USB drives and the cost per gigabyte that is closer to internal drives. You can get external drives that are the same size as internal drives, so single drives are getting close to 2TB. USB 2.0 connections are slower than internal drives however the new e-SATA connection will give you SATA speed in an external unit.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

Network Attached Storage is external storage that can be accessed from anywhere on the network and importantly doesn't need a seperate computer to work. It is a self contained unit with storage and management software built in. If you have multiple computers on your network then a NAS device can be used to centralise storage and allow all computers to access the data all the time. NAS device are more likely to have space for more than one hard drive so that redundancy can be used to protect your data further.

Online Backup

Online backups are backups that are done over the internet. It is most suitable for backing up small data sets. Online backups provide the best offsite solution as the backup can be stored anywhere in the world. However it is the slowest speed backup of the options in our list and you may have to put your data in the hands of a third party and trust them to take care of your data. Some examples of online backup over the internet are http://www.idrive.com/ and http://carbonite.com/. Both of these services have There are also rumours of Google getting into the online storage market with GDrive...

Here is a list showing the strengths and weaknesses of each option:

Large Pen Drive
+ Easy to use
+ Quite fast
+ Very portable
- Small capacity
- High cost per gigabyte

Another internal hard drive
+ Very fast
+ Large capacity
+ Low cost per gigabyte
- Not portable
- Backup not seperate from source

External hard drive
+ Easy to use
+ Quite fast (Very fast with e-SATA)
+ Portable
+ Large capacity
+ Low cost per gigabyte
- Dependant on computer to work

Network Attached Storage (NAS)
+ Independent usage
+ Very large capacity
- Not portable
- Involved setup
- Reletively expense for home use

Online backup
+ Easy to use
+ Independent usage
- Expensive
- Slow
- Third party trust issues

In part 3 we will discuss how to automate backups and come to a conclusion about our home backup strategy