External data storage

**Ringo** · 12/03/2008, 9:24 AM

What are people using for backing up data these days. We used back up tapes up to last year. It appears that no one is taking backup data off site at the moment. Is there web based data storage, or is this too slow? We need to back up about 150gb once a week

**MyTown** · 12/03/2008, 10:14 AM

Don't know if this is of any use to you. I met the owner of this company in the last year. His previous track record in business was pretty good ( in terms of customer service etc.).

The major drawback for me was that he is a passionate Manchester United supporter & there was no way I was making a contribution to the prawn sandwiches.

**tricky_colour** · 12/03/2008, 6:06 PM

Personally I would probaly use a pile of either external or internal hard drives,
you can get 500GB for about £80. It's more expensive then DVD's say but then
it is much more reliable I would say, and if you add in the cost of paying someone to manually burn 100 DVD's that is going to take a while, a whole
day?? And then you have to store 100 DVD's which is a huge pile if you
put them in individual cases which would probably be the safest way.

I imagine it is gonna cost a lot to send 150 gig over then net. You should see what some ISP's are charging for about 3 gig a month!! Of course they have
to be stored on disk after that.

I used to burn to CD's but it was a pain in the ass in many ways so I just bought
a 250 gig hard drive for £50, I think my days of farting around with a stack of
CD's or DVD's are over, nothing but problems is what I remember.

Just get a big harddrive, stick it in your computer and copy the folder or whatever across - job done.

**paul_oshea** · 13/03/2008, 10:03 AM

its slightly different though tricky for companies. tapes weren't just a case of backing up your favourite folder...

**tricky_colour** · 13/03/2008, 11:03 PM

Originally Posted by paul_oshea

its slightly different though tricky for companies. tapes weren't just a case of backing up your favourite folder...

I don't see how it is different for companies, the only difference is that they may have more data to back up. If they put all the stuff they need to back up into their favourite folder then it is just a case of backing up their favourite. It is as simple as that, just conect the drive and copy the folder across.
And it is even better for companies because it is the fastest possible way to restore the data. You are going to need a very fast connection to restore 150 gig in less than 5 minutes!!
For example I have a 2 megabit/s connection so in a hour I can download 60X60X2/8 mbytes=0.9 gigabytes in an hour. Call that 1 gig then it would take me 150 hours!! That's 6 days!! (And then you find it's the wrong folder

).
So even on 20 megabits it would take 12 hours. OK you could do it in 1.2hours on 200megabits/s. To do it in 5 minutes would need over 2 gigabits persecond, which is going to be 'pricey' even if you actually could get it!!

For the reasons I have given I would go for hard drives when you take everything into consideration it seems the best option.
Hard drives also have a resale value, so the cost for say one year would not be a fortune. I could sell my 250 gig drive for about what I paid for it over a year ago, about £50. The values of 30 used DVD's would be aproximately £0.00. Over a year you will have 1500!! Much better to have 50 hard drives worth £2500.