jarchambault
Offline
• •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
There are many good reasons to use RAID drives...this is not one of them.
A prudent backup strategy requires:
a) two copies of all data at all times
and:
b) that both copies do not reside in the same location ever!
This can be done in any number of ways that achieve these two goals, but the most cost effective way is typically to have to use a primary working hard drive for data and two external/removable hard drives for backups. Label the two external hard drives "A" and "B", and store one off-site in a location that you go to on a regular basis (your house, a relative's house, a bank safe-deposit box, or anywhere that isn't next door to your business!). Start with "A" attached to your computer and "B" off-site. On some sort of regular interval take your local copy (currently "A") to the off-site location and exchange it for the off-site drive (currently "B"). Perform another complete backup to "B" and repeat the process. In no case, should "A", "B", and your primary computer ever be in the same place...always take the drives off-site to exchange them. The interval you choose for this exchange should be the maximum amount of data you could afford to lose in a catastrophic event (e.g. a fire). For example, if you could re-shoot the last week's worth of information easily, then swap off-site volumes once a week. Write in the calendar to backup to "A" on the odd weeks of the month, "B" on the even weeks, and then remember to do it religiously.
Other considerations:
a) For efficiency's sake, you would be well served to buy identical drives so that all power adapters and cables are all usable in on both, but this is no requirement.
b) You will also want to consider the relative security of these drives given they are portable versions of important business assets. If you believe that a theft/loss of one of these drives would be ruinous to your business, you will want to leverage some sort of volume encryption program (various operating systems have different options, of your can use a reputable volume encryption program like TrueCrypt). Don't stress over specific encryption types or key lengths (unless you have credible evidence that large, well financed, organizations will target your data), but don't rely on silly encryption capabilities built into hard drives (as they, in addition to be mostly useless from a security point of view, are highly proprietary and hard to recover in the event of a failure).
Now, this is the low end of the backup scale. Depending on the relative value of the data, there are considerably more elaborate schemes that can be employed such as large tape drives to retain not just the data, but all historical copies of the same data, or online backups that are automatically copied off site via high bandwidth links, replicated SANS, etc. However, if you've hit this level of need, you can also afford to hire someone who does this for a living to set up and maintain the system for you!
|
