I will start by assuming if you have followed my column for a bit, you are now backing up.
One question I’m asked all the time is what is the best device to back up to. If you are looking at personal backup devices like hard drives, flash drives, recordable CD’s / DVD’s etc, it’s not a good news story.
I will start with what used to be the norm – recordable CD & DVDs. They are the worst choice. After a couple years, maybe double that, they start to delaminate meaning the content is lost on them
Next in popularity are “flash memory” devices like USB sticks and SSD Drives. For day to day use, they are amazing. They are faster than most other devices because of the nature of their design. That said, from a storage perspective, unless powered up and refreshed at least annually (some brands, even sooner), they can lose their data. Don’t use them to run a backup, stick it somewhere and forget about it. To use on an ongoing basis, they are fine for the repeated daily backup and part of a rotation cycle as long as used regularly. Most people will be hard pressed to hit the maximum read/write cycles of these devices.
If you want to run that archive of photos, videos and other stuff that fills your hard drive then want to stick it away for a extended period of time, nothing beats those old platter based hard drives. They are inexpensive, slow, some are even noisy but they will retain their data the longest. Also, if you are creating archive data backups, make a couple so if one device does fail, you have another with your precious data.
That’s it for this month
Once again, for all your IT needs, don’t hesitate to check us out at desktopsolutioncenter.ca
Dave Bour
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