COMPUTERS - Backup Hardware

This article continues the issue of backing up your system, specifically hardware used.

As I stated in the previous article on this issue, the best backup is written to a hard drive. Tape backups are dependent on the reliability of the tape and tapes ware out.

The method I use at home is an External Firewire Hard drive, but there is another option for using hard drives for backups. This is to have a removable hard drive backup device.

Here are 2 removable hard drive backup devices I know of:

• Iomega REV Internal Drives

Revolutionary internal removable hard disk system (fits into a standard bay)

Iomega® REV® Backup drives and removable disks provide a reliable, easy-to-use backup and disaster recovery solution to safely secure critical data. The award winning Iomega REV family of products is available in 120GB (240GB compressed**), 70GB (140GB compressed**), and 35GB (70GB compressed**) capacities per disk.

• Dell PowerVault RD1000

Removable drive combines the speed of a hard disk with the portability of optical media for quick, easy, affordable backups.

Removable disk drive comes with up to 500 GB cartridges.

At work, we use the Dell PowerVault RD1000 with 320gb hard drive cartridges for backups.

Although this backup hardware is on the pricey side they are worth the cost if your system, and the data on it, is important to you.

CAUTION: These devices likely come with backup software included. The Dell PowerVault RD1000 that we specified for our Dell Server came with Yosemite FileKeeper. Now this is likely good software BUT we ordered and used Symantec Backup Exec. When we installed the PowerVault via the CD, we did not pay attention and it automatically installed FileKeeper (which we had no intension of using). A very big problem came about when we wanted to uninstall FileKeeper. The uninstall caused a complete system crash/lockup. No keyboard, no mouse, nada. We had to manually force power-off (Dell Server does not have a reset button). This in turn cause major problems with uninstalling FileKeeper because the Add/Remove Programs entry was missing. The upshot is, when you install these devices DO NOT install the backup software until you are absolutely sure you are going to use it. You can always install the backup software later.

This hardware (removable hard drives) is best when you use a backup imaging utility with a boot CD, especially when you have to recover you system to a new, blank, hard drive.

Note that this type of hardware does cost more than USB or Firewire external hard drive setup. But I wanted to let you know there are alternatives.