Therefore, the objective of any successful backup strategy would be to ensure that the backup option is easy to use, high on performance, and minimises cost of ownership. Furthermore, a business should understand that even though the cost of implementing and creating a backup strategy might prove to be expensive in the short run, in the long run it is far cheaper than recreating your entire data. While there are many options available for data backup, portable hard disks are fast becoming a must-have for some companies. Traditionally, hard disks were not designed to be portable. Even though there were hardware solutions to enable a user to remove the hard drive, these solutions suffered from various weaknesses. Problems such as maintenance of temperature of the hard disk to a certain level, and shutting down the computer if the hard disk was to be removed securely, used to be common. According to Moore’s Law, a CPU’s speed doubles every 18 months, keeping in mind the technological advancements. Clearly, hard disk capacity improvement has clearly surpassed the Moore’s Law, with improvements in capacity every 12 months on an average. The technological advancements have made the hard disk not only portable but also capable enough to encompass a plethora of benefits. Hard disks have high memory usage, which generally ranges from 8GB to as high as 160GB. They are also relatively inexpensive compared to other backup media options. A backup hard disk option can be used to replicate data on a second hard disk, removable media, or a network server. Using a hard disk backup option for a network server ensures that configuration or confidential web-related data is intact and the time taken to bring the server back to action is minimised. In addition, the high performance of a hard disk backup ensures that the original data is restored without any errors, is easy to check, and can be updated effortlessly. Some of the portable hard disks come with automatic data backup software. However, it is important that we understand the backup software options available to us to analyse our buying needs in the best possible manner. One of the major drawbacks of a hard disk backup can be not to understand how to use the backup software. This will undermine all your valuable retrieval efforts and render the backup media ineffective.

A Guide to Understanding Your Backup Software Options

• Does your backup software allow you to compress your data? Look out for this feature while analysing your backup software. The technology works on the same principle of zipping your files to save space. What is the compression ratio? Generally, higher the ratio, lower the disk space wastage and, consequently, higher the storage capacity. However, you may not want a very high compression ratio because that would dramatically reduce your data backup speed.


• Do you want a file backup or a disk image backup? A disk image backup option will back up your entire hard drive. Therefore, anything that is there on your hard disk will be backed up. Its main advantage is that if your hard drive crashes, then an image backup will allow your business to be up and running within a few minutes because you will not need to reinstall any applications. The flipside is that the image backup can be a lengthy and time-consuming procedure. A file-based backup software will allow you to tell the software the specific files you need to back up. This type of backup saves a lot of disk storage space and is less time-consuming. However, in the event of a catastrophe, it can be very time-consuming because you will need to reinstall the operating system as well as the application software.


• Do you want a total or incremental backup? A total backup will back up all your files without checking if these files are new or modified. It would be a good choice to use this option when you use the software for the first time. However, since this option can consume considerable amount of disk space, use the incremental backup option more frequently. The incremental backup option will backup only new or modified files. Hence, you will save a lot of disk space. Ensure that your backup software lets you choose between these two options.

Portable hard disks have a few drawbacks. It becomes very hard to retrieve hard disks that are damaged due to natural calamity. Katrina floods damaged some of the hard disks beyond repair. Companies can store the backup hard drives in other remote locations to prevent this kind of damage. One of the major drawbacks of the hard disk backup is that they require creation of a file system before they can be used. For this, you will have to create file partitions and each partition will have to be supervised and managed separately. In addition, there is also a dependency between the file system and your system’s operating system. This means that you will have to find out if your current operating system will be able to read the file system you use.

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