Has backup moved past removable media?

by Stephen Withers

Monday, 12 May 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! It's an old saying that you can divide people into two groups: those that don't make regular backups and those that have lost data. But is it time for home and SOHO users to start thinking differently about the way they back up their files? This train of thought was triggered by two announcements I read today. One was the arrival of Iomega's latest REV drives, the other involved a survey suggesting that as little as 15 percent of home users back up at least once a week. What caught my attention was that the 120G REV drive costs over $A800 and the disks cost almost $A150 each. If you can afford to buy five disks at a time, that drops to $A130 each. Looking through local retailers' current ads, I can see a variety of external hard drives: portable models include 250G for $A169 and 320G for $A247, desktop models include 500G for $A145, 750G for $A237, and 1T for $A399. These aren't the cheapest or most expensive I could find, just a representative selection. My point is that the media cost alone for the REV drive is at least $1.08 per gigabyte. The regular drives cost between 29c and 77c per gigabyte. So why would you go for the removable drives instead of buying an external drive every time the old one fills up? Furthermore, bare drives are even cheaper, and I have heard of people that use them with a similar strategy. When a backup drive is full, they remove the old drive from the case, pop in the new one, and store the full drive in the packing that the new drive came in. What else can you do? << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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