Products
Backup Alternatives
Often, people think of a tape as a dinosaur when compared to the new range of fast, directly-accessible storage media. Yet, tapes are ideal for backup. Businesses use tapes because they find it to be a cost effective backup solution, and tape backup will continue to be used for some time to come. Nonetheless, you will probably be interested to know that there are several alternatives to tapes, some of which may be more suitable for your business.
Backup to NAS Devices
NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices are attached directly to your network and can act as a backup store. Obviously, it is very convenient to backup to NAS and retrieve files; there's no disks or tapes to insert and remove, and NAS devices can be treated as just another server. There are many NAS devices specially designed for small businesses. Excellent for network backup.
Backup to REV Drive
In April 2004, Iomega released the REV Drive - A new storage device that has greater capacity than tapes and is 5 to 8 times faster. Key features include:
- Backup to REV Drive is much faster than tape backup and has a higher capacity
- REV Drive units are more durable than tapes
- While tapes require regular cleaning, no cleaning is required for REV Drive units
Backup to REV Drives may in fact prove more cost effective for your business than tapes, depending on your backup scheme and various other factors. Otherwise, backup to REV is very similar to tape backup in principle.
Final Notes
As always, invest in a quality backup program. Many backup programs will support a number of backup devices, so there is no need to buy specialist REV backup software or NAS backup software.
This article was brought to you buy BackupAssist - Data Backup Software.