Backup Guide - Online and Hardware Solutions Examined

There are plenty of lessons to be learnt from not backing up your data. According to most surveys floating around the Internet, there are less than 20% of computer users who actually backup their data. Considering our hard drives are usually chocked full of important information, that's a staggering figure, especially since we are still working with electrical components with moving parts (bring on solid state storage!) that are prone to failure. A large amount of people are putting a huge amount of faith in their hard drives and computer systems but is that entirely wise? Not really!

Last year I personally suffered major data loss through a broken RAID - it was a RAID 0 array that went bad because one of the drives in the array decided to die without any warning and being this type of array (without any form of redundancy) it makes it a very hard job to get the data back. While it's not an impossible task, for the average user, it will be near impossible unless you have plenty of money to spend on data recovery.

After reading a newspaper article recently, we discovered there are plenty of online backup sites which will store your data for you on their servers - some free and some are paid services. There are also more expensive hardware backup solutions, such as the Freedom9 freeStor 4020, which we will be taking a closer look at today in this guide. These types of devices are designed more for SOHO and business users but if your data is important to you, it is money well spent no matter who you are. We'll also look at some cheaper alternatives if you don't wish to spend as much money.

Let's change those backup percentage figures - today we'll give you a rundown of those online backup services, the hardware solutions and generally good practices in preventing data loss through measures such as using RAID arrays with redundancy, Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware software.