Hardware

There are many backup devices available.  Currently the best choices are in bold:

• Floppy  This if fine for individual who need to backup their checkbook but it is typically impractical.  Even a checking account application backup may require many disks.  Floppies are unpredictable so you may find out (the hard way) that you backed-up to a bad disk, making restoration impossible.
• Tape drive
• CD drive
• HDD
• Web based but this is so impractical for even high speed user's, we're not going to address it.

Tape Drives

A tape unit is by-far the best choice for speed, reliability and storage capacity but they can be very expensive.  There are many tape formats but the two common ones are: 4mm/DDS and Travan/QIC, which are capable of storing 2 to 40 gigabytes (some store even more.)  

Travan/QIC

These are typically the lower end tape drives that can be installed in most computers.  They share the IDE or SCSI connections with your hard and CD drives.  (Current) pricing for the average drive is around $350 and tapes around $30.  Their transfer speed is typically 1-3 megabytes per second.  

Unlike DDS tapes, it has been our experience that the Travan tapes fail prematurely. 

4MM/DDS

A much better choice but also more expensive.  These generally require a special SCSI card and cable.  (Current) pricing for a good drive is about $1,600 (with the SCSI card and cable.)  Tape pricing is about the same as the Travans.  Transfer speed is typically 3-6 Mbps.  

CD Backup

CD-RW devices will run you around the $100+ range and are capable of writing around 7 megabytes per second.
For more information on CD speeds, see 11-03. 

Small business and home users (using Windows XP) can can manually drag and drop data to a CD, which is an easy, reliable and inexpensive way to go, however...  

While dragging and dropping to a CD is quick and easy, it is a manual task.  We have found scheduling an overnight backup to a CD is at best, an unpredictable operation.  We have tried many different software packages in efforts of backing up to CD but as of yet, we have not found any package that reliably backs-up each night (scheduled backups.)  Inevitably they error out unable to write to the CD, they simply do not start the process or you have a message in the morning prompting you to over-write the current media. 

CD-R and CD-RW

CDs are limited to about 650 megabytes of information which may be enough for the average home user but it is far too little for businesses.  If you have more than about 650Mb of data the backup process will span multiple CDs and this is simply too time consuming.

DVD

Can hold about 4.6 gigabytes which is sufficient for most small business (or home users with teenagers).  Better DVD devices will run you around the $280 range and are capable of writing at about 5.4  megabytes per second. 

HDD

Hard Disk Drive and for the purpose of this information, a removable drive.  The huge drawback is there is only one backup media.  So if you happen to drop and damage the removable disk and have your computer's drive failed, you have nothing!  

Continue to Methods