Switching from CD to Disk Backups

Writing for the San Jose Mercury News, Dave Wilson writes about making the switch from trying to back everything up to recordable CD media to using an external hard drive for backups instead. He paints a common picture of how growing hard disk sizes are just making optical media too inconvenient for backup up lots of data, while dropping hard disk prices make it more appealing to just back things up onto a spare hard drive.

His view of security does seem a little over-optimistic, however, when he claims that "storing sensitive data on an external drive keeps it safe from [...] hackers". The fact is, people are probably going to leave that backup drive plugged in for extended periods of time, during which its just as vulnerable to hackers as the main drive. Also, should you decide to perform image backups to your external drive, a virus infection on your main drive will simply be faithfully copied to the second drive.

Still, this article is a good depiction of the decision process lots of power users are going through in trying to figure out how to back up those larger hard disks. You can avoid the draconian Mercury News registration process by viewing the article over at ITtoolbox .

July 19, 2004July