Linda posted on February 03, 2010 10:06
Okay, I have to admit - my title is completely unoriginal. I read it as a tweet a couple of days ago. Since there was no link with the tweet, I am assuming that whoever wrote it just wanted to say that you are better off economically backing up to an external drive.
And I can't arque with that.
I can say that if cheap is your only criteria for a good backup, then you can also back up to a CD or DVD for a whole lot less than the external drive if you just have some critical data that you want to protect.
But I am definitely not recommending either of those as an option, unless you are disciplined enough to make sure that the backups are occurring as scheduled and that they are running successfully. That assumes that you have a way to schedule the backups. If you don't, then you need the discipline to do the backup in the first place. And you probably need to have two external drives so you can keep one off site so you will have it in case of fire. If you can handle all of that - then have at it.
So what do I recommend?
I recommend that, unless you feel that you have enough technical competence to be responsible for your backups and the discipline to make sure they are working every day, you subscribe to a service with your trusted technology company that backs up your data every night. You are paying them to monitor your backups and make sure they are working - and get the data to an offsite location.
If you just have a small amount of data to backup, it won't even cost you a lot of money, perhaps as little as $50 per month. If you want to back up entire servers and be able to virtualize in the event of a disaster, then it will obviously be more expensive.
And the best companies will offer you a money back guarantee. Look for something that states that if you have a failure and your data is not available, the company will refund 100% of the money you have paid for the service. With that guarantee in hand, you can be pretty sure you will never need it!