Common question customers ask: “What drive & back solution do you recommend?”

Unfortunately, all hard drives fail for various reasons, whether they are design, manufacturing, wear-n-tear, or user error related. Therefore, no particular brand or model hard drive is exceptional. This “better drives” article may help understanding better.

A sound backup strategy is to no longer count on a drive's reliability, rather, rely on the process of keeping the data alive on multiple hardware devices, regardless of device brand.

The most effective backup strategy is known as the 3-2-1 backup plan, where we would have 2 onsite local backups, while the 3rd backup would be offsite. Local onsite backups would be at your home or business location, while offsite backup refers to a copy of the data on another hardware device in a different location, meaning another building, city, state or even country. Offsite data backups are meant to protect from any fire, flood and other unpredictable natural disasters.

Since they are locally readily available, onsite backups are beneficial in being able to access and restore data from a backup quickest. Typically, most individuals and small businesses would create backups on external hard drives with various interfaces for easy and fastest data transfer over USB3.0, USB-C, Thunderbolt, FireWire, e-SATA and SATA type of port connectors. Those types of external drive would be called Direct Attached Storage (DAS), as they would connect directly to your computer or server. Another way to connect to a backup would be via WiFi, where we would be storing the backup files onto a Network Attached Storage (NAS). A NAS device is essentially an external drive connected to your local router, allowing your computers, tablets and smartphones to communicate with it via WiFi. See more details below, please.

For very basic backup needs at a low cost, we recommend at least two external drives, backing up each other, as follows:

Computer > External drive 1 > External drive 2, or

Computer > External drive 1 & Computer > External drive 2, where both externals are connected to the same computer. For this strategy, we would recommend a desktop type external drive that it is set in place and does not move often. The second external drive can be a portable small USB kind, ideally for while on-the-go or offsite storage.

For more advanced home or small business needs, we would recommend a NAS based backup strategy as follows:

Device (computer/server/smartphone/tablet) > NAS (Network Attached Storage) > External Drive (USB, eSATA, Firewire, Thunderbolt, etc)

Most NAS devices have USB ports on the front and back planes, allowing to connect a variety of portable DAS (Direct Attached Storage, such as an external hard drive, for example).

Here is a list of popular NAS devices from a fairly reputable source, PC Magazine:

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp

Although we are not the biggest fan, you can also look into cloud solutions, at least for the most critical files. If the files are important, it is a good idea to have a backup offsite, such as in the cloud, in case of flooding, fires, storms, etc. Cloud providers could be the well known iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, BackBlaze, iDrive, Amazon Drive & Amazon Photos storage services, and so on.

Whatever 3-2-1 backup strategy you decide to implement, the goal is to be disciplined in keeping up with the backup routine, so that we can have multiple copies of the data on at least 3 media in different locations in case the need for disaster recovery occurs. This way, if one storage medium fails, we have access to the data on another.

While a manual file backup procedure is the best in terms of “seeing and confirming” the backup is taking place correctly, there are many options for automated backup procedures that rely on proprietary software to sync the files from your computer to the storage device. Most backup software options are platform based. For example, Time Machine Backup is an Apple backup solution, therefore it will work on your Mac computers.

If you would like us to help you with a backup strategy solution tailored to your needs, we can definitely assist you. 

We must first have a consultation on what type of data you have, how much data and how it is accessed currently, as well as growing data needs in the future.

The consultation will allow our data experts to tailor a proper data backup and disaster recovery solution according to your needs.

This type of service starts at $200. The cost of devices and installation is extra.

For quick questions, please contact us via WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Text or Call at 617-571-9172.