VISUAL NEWSLETTER – AUG 2002
BACKUP STRATEGIES REVISITED
In spite of our constant warnings,
almost every month at least one of our clients experiences a data loss due to
weak backup strategies. The biggest single impediment to routine backups is the
time that it takes, so we would like to review a few of the new technologies
that are making backups easier.
Right now, the emerging backup standard
seems to be the CD-Writer. These units can write data to special types of CD’s
that hold 500-700 megabytes of data. Most standard CD-ROM drives can in turn
read this data as necessary. The main disadvantage of this media in the past
was speed, but with write speeds from 24x to 40x this
has now been overcome and they are quite fast.
These units generally run from $150 to
$200 each with rewriteable media going for about $2. per
CD-RW disk. Media that can be recorded once only is less expensive at about $1.
per CD-R disk. One advantage of CD-R disks is that they
can be rendered readable in any normal CD-Rom drive. CD-RW disks can usually
only be read in another CD-Writer or
This low cost makes CD backups very
economical and easily allows for multiple generations of backups, which is
always desirable. In fact, some of our clients have opted to save their backups
daily on CD-R disks with one disk backing up each day or an entire week of data
in separate folders. Once used, these disks are labelled and put on the shelf,
in case they are ever required.
These units can also make copies of
other CD’s for backup purposes and otherwise perform all the duties of a normal
CD-Rom. For full system backups CD Writers will work well in conjunction with
the right software. On large systems data compression may be required to fit
entire systems on one disk.
Along the same idea as the CD-Writer,
the DVD-Writer looks and works almost the same way but has about 10 times the
capacity. Unfortunately this technology is still quite new and the cost and
speed are not yet up to par. Far fewer computers have DVD drives capable of
reading the disks as well. This is an emerging technology that will increase in
popularity as these issues are addressed.
OTHER BACKUP TECHNOLOGIES
One of my other favourites thus far is
the
In tests at several clients, data
backups that took 10-20 diskettes completed on one zip disk in less time than
it took to backup a single diskette. The speed alone more than justifies the
cost and you get improved protection from more frequent backups.
Zip drives cost about $150, with the
disks going for around $15. When you compare the speed and capacity of the zip
disks they really are a bargain when compared to diskette backups. For routine
data only backups these are an excellent choice. They can be installed on any
Pentium, or faster, computer with an available IDE connection.
The next step up in backup and storage
media are the Jazz drives with 2GB of storage capacity. These are excellent for
drive imaging and complete system backups. Windows based computers quickly use
up hard disk space and these units can be good insurance against hardware
failure and the cost of reloading fifty software programs.
These units cost between $500 &
$600 with disk media running from $50 to $100 each.
Restoring a full Windows based system
can be a long and tedious process. New backup software can make this process
much less painful. If you make a full system backup you can install it on a new
drive in a fraction of the time it would take to reload everything.
For very high capacity backups, digital
tape is still your best bet for capacities over 2GB. These can be setup on a
server to backup automatically, but need to be monitored.