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View Full Version : Flash Drive vs. External Hard Drive for Backup



Scott Shepherd
01-31-2008, 1:51 PM
After a near fatal (to me) scare recently, I'm in the mode to double and triple backup my computer, since it runs my laser (and everything else in the business).

I normally keep a reasonable level of backups on a Flash Drive.

I'm looking at a external hard drive and using some replicator software to basically mirror the drive on a normal basis. In looking at it all, I'm confused on why I should use a Hard Drive vs. a Flash Drive. I don't have a lot of photos that need to be backed up, so my file sizes are relatively low. I believe a 16GB flash drive would be more than enough to backup the important files.

That's one option. The other option is just buy a big fat drive and replicate the entire drive.

Any opinions on why I should or shouldn't use the flash drive over the hard drive?

Walt Nicholson
01-31-2008, 2:06 PM
We have a large server at work with an internal mirrored hard drive for backup but is also backs up every day to a flash drive. The last person out pulls the flash drive and puts it in a fireproof safe. Once a month we do a month-end backup on a flash drive and that one is kept off-site at one of the manager's house. If there is ever a major fire and the server and backup hard drive is destroyed, we have everything we need (except software (Corel Draw, Office, etc.) to get going again. Customer records, files we have created, etc. are safe. The mirrored hard drive will help you if your main hard drive crashes but it will melt right along with it in a fire.:D:D

Joe Pelonio
01-31-2008, 2:10 PM
I use DVDs, they hold a lot more than CDs and can be stored off-site. There are also web-based solutions, some ISPs will have available storage for you to
upload backups that you can access with a new computer if needed.

Prashun Patel
01-31-2008, 2:13 PM
If yr reading/writing frequently, HD's are better engineered for that purpose.

I'd get an external USB HD, one that's USB-powered. They work just like a flash, but with more capacity and (IMHO) reliability. This type of hd is about the size of a deck of cards; it's like a big flash drive with a tail!

Mirroring sw is a great idea. It'll save you from having to reconfig yr main hd in case of failure.

Jeffrey Fusaro
01-31-2008, 2:27 PM
we had a near melt-down on a two month old computer.

i had spent a lot of time doing all the routine o/s and software upgrades, since a machine is out of date by the time you bring it home. lot's of downloads via dial-up. and lot's of time.

we had a few thousand digital photos, too. luckily they were spared.

the computer manufacturer replaced the failed hardrive, but i was back to square one with all of the software upgrades/downloads.

never again.

i bought a spare internal hard drive and installed it into an empty bay in the computer.

then, i bought norton ghost. i created an entire mirror image of my main drive on the spare - o/s, software, files, digital photos, everything!

i back up everything on a routine basis. if the main drive crashes, i have everything on the seocnd drive.

digital photos are also backed up two sets of dvd's. one at home. one in the bank vault.

over kill? maybe. but, i now have over 25k photos, and i am not risking losing them.

Jim Becker
01-31-2008, 3:03 PM
Given the low cost, why not use both? Use the external drive for regular "daily" backups and do a flash drive backup at some other regular interval...and put it in your safe. The latter is even better if the safe is in a different building. :)

Rick Frye
01-31-2008, 7:50 PM
The easiest to recover with is a "ghost" image of your hard drive onto another hard drive of equal or greater capacity. In the event of drive failure, it's as simple as swap the drive out, restart the computer, then continue working...

Joe Mioux
01-31-2008, 8:59 PM
I went through a major (for my business) upgrade last Summer. Now I have a server with a Mirrored Hard Drive and old fashioned back up tapes. My consultant likes the tapes, which is fine with me.

Do tapes ever go bad? I belong to another forum in my business field and I believe someone there mentioned that tapes are only good for about 6 months. Is that true?

I have 7 tapes which correlate to the days of the week, except Sunday. I have two Monday's though. Don't really undertand that, but ......

Joe

Scott Shepherd
01-31-2008, 9:56 PM
Tapes do break down as well as CD's and DVD's. Last time I saw, DVD's outlasted CD's many times over, but still they showed signs of breaking down after only a couple of years. With your family history of photos stored on them, it only takes one tiny particle to go bad and it's all lost.

I'm getting more and more paranoid about my personal photos. Those I have in about 4 different places, all in different media. CD's, DVD's, Portable Hard Drives, normal hard drives and really important photos on an off site server.

All that and I still am paranoid about losing photos.

Not worried as much about work related, since even if all is lost, filewise, it's just a matter of doing the work over again to reproduce it. Not fun, but certainly something that can be done. However, I can't take another photo of someone who's passed away.

Curt Harms
01-31-2008, 10:08 PM
I use this:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-linux.htm
I'm not an It pro like some here, but it seems like backing up something in an inactive state is better than backing up something that is operating. I downloaded the linux image, burned it to a CD, booted from that CD and I was in business. I don't know Linux command line commands and don't have to. It's fast and has proven reliable. One thing it won't do is make incremental backups. I keep my data on a different partition from Operating system and programs. I can restore the operating system and programs from an image a few weeks old and won't lose much. My data files are on a separate partition that is much smaller and easier to back up regularly to a USB drive or whatever. I use syncback to synchronize data files on 2 different computers and the USB drive constitutes and 3rd backup of the data files. As others have pointed out, the best security is to keep one copy off site.

HTH


Curt

Steve knight
01-31-2008, 10:55 PM
I have my home computer I use for business and the one at work. both backup to external drives because they are laptops otherwise I would use internal as the speed is far better. I sync the two computers over the internet with the important and used files. I use foldershare it is free and works pretty well.

Rich Engelhardt
02-01-2008, 6:04 AM
Hello,

There's no perfect solution.

- Mirrored drives only guard against the physical failure of the main drive.
A fault in the controller or a virus that affects the OS, will affect both drives equally. Still, it's "cheap" insurance and highly recommended.
Mirroring your internal hard drive to an external USB drive will slow the system down. The transfer rate is far greater on the internal drive controller than even USB 2.0 or firewire is capable of.

- Tapes vs DVD/CD. Tapes are faster and more durable and hold more data and have a longer storage life. CD's and DVD's come in different levels. The ones you buy off the shelf at Office Max, Staples, etc, are not rated for data guarding. Most are rated for 5 to 10 years. That's sufficient for most applications except for records which neeed to be 7 years. For anything finacial or tax related, spring for the better 20 to 100 year rated ones.

- Tapes do break down. We recommend changing them every 2 years as a broad brush rule. There's also a wide variety of tape formats - DLT, AIT and DAT are the most common. SDLT is the higher end of the tape spectrum with the greatest capacity and highest transfer rate. Tapes, the tape drives and the automated software which allows scheduling backups, all add up to a lot of money. Expect to pay in the neighborhood of $3K to $5K for that type of setup to back up ~100 GB. DLT and SDLT tapes will generally run about $100. a tape. Treat them gently. If you accidently drop one on the floor, consider it damaged beyond repair and destroy it. DO NOT try to use it. I won't go into the technical details - but - a dropped tape can lead to a ruined tape drive. The way it damages the drive is unique to using a damaged tape. It voids the warranty on the drive. I've had the displeasure of having to tell far to many customers they are out thousands of dollars on ruined drives because they used a damaged tape in the unit.
Having said that, tapes are the defacto standard for the present. Support for extracting tape stored data is nearly universal.

- Ghost and other drive imaging products are good, provided you have other system hardware that supports the hardware abstaction layer & drivers. If you've ghosted the image of you aged Pentium II based system and try to recover from a total system failure by using that image on your brand new AMD Athlon system, you're going to probably be out of luck.
It's also only as good as the last image. if you don't image it frequently, then your data is going to be stale.

- Online backups via the internet are expensive and slow. Upstream speeds (the rate at which you transfer data from your PC to the backup device on the WEB) of most broadband (DSL & Cable) are throttled back to ~ 768Kb per second. Data you download can come in at a rate of 1.5 Mb to 10 Mb per second. Goin up, you have ~ half of what you have coming down. If you have several GB of data to transfer it can take an excessive amount of time.
"Pay for" services generally run compression on the data prior to sending and/or use full and differential backup schemes to minimize the time/amount of data sent. Text based files compress to nearly 90%. Images (.jpg's, MP3 movies, etc) are already compressed and will usally only compress another 1/2 to 1%.

- Flash drives vs USB hard drives. Flash drives are far more expensive per byte than a USB hard drive. They are generally more reliable since they have no moving parts. HOWEVER. They use a hybrid form of dynamic RAM.
Small capacitors provide the power to keep the data intact rather than using a battery. The caps need recharged from time to time. If you use a USB flash drive, don't fill it and toss it in the drawer expecting the data to be there in a couple of years.

- Internal hard drives. There've been more interfaces in the last 15 years than you can shake a stick at. MFM, RLL, IDE, EIDE, SATA, SCSI, ESDI are the ones that I have in the 'puter room where I'm typing this right now.
The data I have stored on the MFM, RLL and ESDI drives is ~ 10 to 12 years old. It's also unusable since I have no system that supports the drives.

Rich Engelhardt
02-01-2008, 6:45 AM
(more)


Ok what do I, as an IT professional, use?

- #1 - multiple systems. I have a laptop I use for work. I never connect it to my home network excpet for one thing. I back it up to MY home system.
MY home system. I'm the only one that uses it. Mine is the most recent hardware platform I can afford and I turn it every few years. I control what software goes on it and the use of it. I archive saved data to CD or DVD. I then convert that CD or DVD to an .iso file and store the .iso image on an external USB drive. I also use a few USB flash drives and a few internal hard drives and a couple of external USB hard drives.
All told, I believe I have ~ 30TB of data/capacity.
When I turn a PC, I roll it down to my wife to use. Since they systems are networked, I back her system up to mine using the native Windows XP backup.
When mine rolls to her, her's rolls down to my son & grandson to use.

#2 - Virtual system/Virtual PC. A virtual system is probably the single best thing to come down the (computer) pike since the plug in expansion card.
(I'm not going into detail simply to save room - google "virtual PC" or VMware for details.
The only drawback to it is that you'll have to layout the money for the operating system used by the virtual PC. I run an old copy of Windows 98 inside mine.

#3 - Floppy disks. Yes, I still have quite a few. They are slow and have limited capacity - but - they last almost forever given reasonable care.

#4 - but should be #1 - common sense.
If I had a dime for every time someone hadn't tested the validity of their backups, I could buy a Domino - for myself and ~ half of SMC.
I see this all too often. People backup religously...then never try a test restore to make sure the backup is valid.
I'm not too proud to admit having been bitten by this myself. I had a "good" system backup (or so I thought) up until the point I tried to restore what I needed.
In my case, I had another copy of what I needed, but it was several miles away.

mark page
02-01-2008, 11:43 AM
I have a little over a terabyte of storage in my home system. With a little more than half of this set up on raid arrays. I need the large storage due to media/movie/dvd conversions, etc. I use Norton Ghost to back-up images of my drives. I could use a mirrored raid 4 system, but hate losing the extra storage space. My situation is a little more in depth as Ghost does not load my raid drivers, so I keep a 30g drive I can dual boot the operating system on from the bios with the bare necessities to do restores if needed. This has saved my butt several times in the last few years. It is no fun spending a week to reload all programs and saved files from cd's, dvd's, and floppy's.
In a basic system Norton Ghost is invaluable and all it takes is another hard drive, whether IDE, SERIAL, or USB external drive to make a complete useable copy of your original hard drive. You can be back on-line in the amount of time it takes to reboot your system and change the operating system drive in the bios. I use a ghost compressed image format due to my hardrive sizes and it takes me about two hours to restore and get back on-line in an operating system failure.

Bryan Rocker
02-01-2008, 7:57 PM
I have been concerned about backing up things. Last night I purchased a 500 gig IOMEGA external HD for $120. Portable HD's are the way to fly......

Thomas Knighton
02-01-2008, 10:05 PM
About 2 years ago, my company handed me an external hard drive to hook up to my computer at work. Obviously, the purpose was to back up information, some of which is only possessed by me. I felt pretty secure with that external drive humming away on my desk.

Well, that is, I did feel good about it until about three months ago when the thing broke. IT did what they could to save it, and retrieved a lot of the files and put them on a network hard drive. Then, about three weeks ago, they changed over our computers, and my copies on my HD were lost. That's OK, they're on the shared drive. Unfortunately, of the 34 files I needed, 14 were corrupted and unusable. I'm just glad I had backed everything onto CD.

The point of my story? Don't trust any one method with your backups. The more backups you have, the better your chances of recovering from a catastrophic failure.

Tom