Digital BW, The Print

On 2/5/2010 6:33 AM, Richard Sintchak wrote:
> Just curious.  How is the (and the time it takes) better than an additional
> external HD that you backup everything to once a month or every few weeks
> and store at your work, or parents, or somewhere else?  I just got a Seagate
> 1.5TB Ext HD for $99.

Several reasons.

1) If your house is destroyed (burns down, earthquake, etc.), your
    remote back-up is likely to remain intact.

2) A single external disk drive has reliability limits, you may find
    it has read errors when you really need to restore from it.  A
    good backup service stores data on redundant arrays of disks (either
    some form of RAID or multiple shadow copies, or both).  Further,
    as disk errors are detected in these redundant arrays, the disks
    are replaced without loss of data or availability.

3) Over time, you want to migrate your archive from one kind of
    storage to another to avoid the 8-track syndrome (lots of tapes
    but your player died and you can't replace it).  A good back-up
    service is accessed via the network and can migrate actual
    storage as necessary, and the network interface is likely to
    remain useful for a very long time.

It's far better to back-up to an external disk than no back-up
at all, though.

Dana
(near Benicia, on a fault line)