Good Backup Practices and Hardware Options

Good Backup Practices and Hardware Options Robbie Ferguson: I want to take a look at backups tonight, really get into we’re starting a four part series on backups and one of the things that I want to reiterate is the importance of keeping a backup, and I don’t mean just running the backup once in a while. We tend to back up our files. Let me think of it, so you can end in a disk per hour maybe burn it to the CD or DVD and then throw it in a drawer or somewhere put it in a stock of other DVDs and not label them and stuff like that, so that can be a problem and that concerns me. One of the things that I want to look at is some of the options that we have as far as storage goes, so I just brought a couple of devices that I use and maybe if you have any questions for me Carrie that you know, so that we can explain things a little better. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: If things are getting a little confusing or whatever. Carrie Webb: Okay, I’ll pay attention. I always be. Robbie Ferguson: So, we’ve got our flash drive. This is like typical over the counter now. Carrie Webb: Yeah, that’s what I use all the time. Robbie Ferguson: This is what you use for your backups? Carrie Webb: Yup. Robbie Ferguson: My wife uses this as well because she doesn’t have very high capacity needs for her backups, so she just pops this in. She keeps here files on a hard drive but then when she wants to run a backup she manually put in her flash drive, copies her files over to the flash drive and I think she actually just keep it in her purse which is a brilliant thing because on the way out of the door if there’s an emergency or something you tend to grab your purse anyways, right? So, that’s something to keep in mind as well. And then I’ve got an external USB drive. John this is something like what we were talking about with an external USB 2.0 drive, so it’s just the USB and I uses power and this is just basically any of these devices or just a regular hard drive put into an external chassis. So, inside of this device is just a standard hard drive something similar to this. That one got a cable on it. Here we go, something on these lines, so this is actually inside of this device. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: So, that is good because it’s high capacity but in this instance it’s only one drive so there’s no redundancy on this drive, so that means that if this drive gets drought, if this drive gets the image there’s not copy of this drive, so as far as redundancy goes it’s not back rate. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: But it is as long as you keep a file like a copy on your hard drive at the same time then this can be redundant to your computer’s hard drive, right? Carrie Webb: Okay, yeah. Robbie Ferguson: So, to step it up from there is you can look at devices called either RAID. You can see RAID NAS if you see that. That is a Network-Attached storage Device. There’s another device called the Drobo which is similar to a RAID and I’m going to tell you a little bit about what a RAID is that’s essentially being able to put and this is very lay terms to try to explain it. Being able to put more than one hard in this external enclosure in such a way that when you backup to that drive. It actually copies it to two or three or four drive simultaneously. Carrie Webb: Okay, It’s like carbon paper Robbie Ferguson: Exactly. Carrie Webb: But you write on it and it goes through. Robbie Ferguson: Right, so then what happens is not only you’re backing up if your hard drive and your computer crashes, but what happens if your data backup drive crashes. Carrie Webb: And you lost everything. Robbie Ferguson: These hard drives do tend to crash. Carrie Webb: Yeah. Robbie Ferguson: Yeah, then you’ve lost everything, and ironically, here’s a good situation not a good one but here’s what happened to me once and I tend to keep good backups but few years ago. Oh, it’s not few years ago many years ago one of the wake up calls for me is I had an external backup drive. I backed up my entire hard drive to that backup drive. It was just a single drive. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: Thinking now I’ve got a backup. Now I’m going to reformat my computer and install the new operating systems, so I was upgrading my computer I had backup to a single drive. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: And now it’s going to wipe out my computer, so I did that then when I hooked up that backup drive that backup drive crashed. Carrie Webb: So, you have nothing from this one. Robbie Ferguson: So, I had wiped out my computer and then I went to copy everything back and lost it all, so that’s a good example of we’re having had a RAID device it would have been substantially better for me because then at least if that hard drive will crash or we have that redundant copy within that external backup drive, and you cans see that that will be you know, we tend to you know, you’ve got to backup your stuff and then wipe out your hard drive if you want to upgrade your computer and things like that, so better watch out for that. Also I mentioned the Drobo. The Drobo is quite expensive but it’s a similar device to RAID but it’s a little more user friendly when it comes to set up and things like that. You can just pop in drives and take them out and things you don’t have to configure the RAID controllers or anything like that. So, if you’re an end user who has a little bit extra money to kill and you want to have a really good redundant back up this device uses USB 2.0 and allows you to put in up to four drives and they can be in any capacity among themselves so you don’t have to match up the capacities which is really nice. So, other than that I’ve got my blocks from the Thermaltake which I reviewed quite a while ago. The thing I love about this is it’s got not only USB 2.0 but also it’s got a Serial ATA, so USB 2.0 as I was mentioning to John a little earlier is only 480-megabits a second so that’s the speed of the drive. On the other hand ESATA allows you to plug directly into the SATA bus on your computer’s motherboard which means the drive is going to carry data at 3-gigabits per second. Carrie Webb: Is that more than a gig like that’s a gig, is that right? Robbie Ferguson: As far as gigabytes going not gigabytes, gigabits. Carrie Webb: Oh no, I’m thinking gigabytes. Robbie Ferguson: 3-gigabits versus USB 2.0 which will be only at .4 of a gigabit. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: So, it’s substantially faster if you go with SATA, so this allows you to use SATA drives or SATA hard drive, laptop hard drives so both form factors of drive, so I find this is really handy to keep by my desk because I like to you know, back up to external like two drives all the time and I don’t necessarily want to have to use an enclosure. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: so, those are a couple of options and of course if you’d like to get into our website Category5.tv visit the forum it’s episode number 68. We love to have your comments, find out what you use for your data backups and sort of to find some recommendations for anyone who is looking for something for their needs as well.