HD Backups

Many people have gone the route of buying an extra hard drive to back-up their data. And why not? Hard drives are fast and cheap. If they're connected via a USB or Firewire port, they're easy to install. Almost any backup package will back-up to a hard drive. A hard drive can be backed up to over and over again without incurring new costs, and the drive doesn't wear out from repeated use.

And what are the down-sides? A backup hard disk is generally attached to the same computer as the source drive. This means that if something bad happens to the computer (fire, theft, power surge, etc) the backup drive is likely to go away as well. It's also expensive to use a hard drive as an off-site backup; one would need at least two drives, reducing the value proposition. Hard drives aren't good for archival storage (by archival, we mean 5 to 10 years); one can't store a hard drive for years, plug it in and have a high expectation that it will work, since drives naturally deteriorate over time. Finally, hard drives themselves over time are unreliable; that's why we were backing one up in the first place!

We highly recommend using hard drives for fast data backups and their other obvious advantages. However, we also recommend that some other removable backup method is used (for instance, tape, DVD, or CD) to overcome a hard drive's limitations.