News: Computer Hardware for Small Business

A Simple, Yet Effective Addition to Your Tape Backup: An External Hard Drive

by Keith R. Wheeler

12/16/2004

As the year comes to a close, price drops in some parts of technology become very evident. One such product that gets attention is an external hard drive such as Maxtor’s OneTouch 160 GB model. With a price from CDW of less than $200.00, an additional level of backup can be added to your network easily and affordably. External drives are not meant to be a replacement for tape backup due to tape’s ability to be moved offsite as well as the fact that you can have tapes from multiple dates in past for archive purposes. In addition to having another source of backup, external hard drives offer great convenience in restoring files. When restoring from tape, the correct tape needs to be loaded, the catalog searched, the tape spun to the correct location, and the file(s) restored to the server. In the case of external hard drive, the steps pertaining to loading the tape and spinning to the correct location are skipped entirely. While that may not seem like a lot, most of the time when a file needs to be restored, there is a significant sense of urgency involved. And for a couple hundred dollars, you can rest assured that your data would exist in three locations rather than two.