In honor of World Backup Day: How to protect your data

March 31, 2013

Happy World Backup Day, an occasion dedicated to encouraging you to make sure all your digital data is kept safe and secure. If you’ve procrastinated on implementing a backup strategy for your PC, why not mark the occasion by making backup copies of all your documents, digital photos, music, videos, and other invaluable files? We’ll help you get started. What to look for in a backup drive The main things to consider when shopping for a backup drive are capacity and connection options. If your computer has a 1TB hard drive bursting at its seams, don’t purchase a 500GB model for a back-up. I’d suggest a drive with at least twice the capacity of the volume you’re backing up. This will allow you to store copies of all of your data, and it will leave room for the new pictures, movies, and files you’ll continue to add to your computer. In terms of connections, USB 3.0 is speedy, inexpensive, and pervasive. Even if your PC doesn’t support that newish standard, the USB 3.0 port on the back-up drive is backward compatible to the ubiquitous USB 2.0. Data transfers from a USB 2.0 PC will occur at pokey USB 2.0 speeds, but when you do upgrade your system, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the drive’s intrinsic performance. Thunderbolt is even faster, but that interface is relatively rare—at least on Windows PCs. You might also consider moving up to a storage device that connects to your data network, instead of a USB or Thunderbolt port. A network-attached storage (NAS) box can support one or more client PCs, and some offer storage redundancy in the form of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). RAID 1 creates a mirror image of your backups, so that your data will be preserved if one of the drives fails. A RAID 5 array requires a minimum of three hard drives, but if any one of them fails, your data can be recovered from the remaining drives, and the array can be rebuilt after you replace that drive. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2032508/in-honor-of-world-backup-day-how-to-protect-your-data.html#tk.rss_reviews