I’ve been arguing with people (besides my children) lately, this time about backup options. Primarily, some of the vendors of the new USB 2.0 hard drives are mad because I don’t think they make a good small business backup option.
If you haven’t noticed, USB thumb drives grew up (kind of like my children). The early USB sockets weren’t fast enough to make USB hard drives exciting, but the USB 2.0 specification, on every new computer for the past several years, supports transfer speeds up to 480M bit/sec. And vendors have taken advantage of smaller hard drives to put scores of gigabytes in products the size of thick business cards.
USB hard drive product marketing touts lots of advantages, including transferring files between systems (high tech SneakerNet). The larger disks provide extra storage for those with stuffed internal disks, and often come with pretty good backup software.
But I say the drives aren’t good business backups, and the vendors get mad and point to the good backup software. Most software even tracks different computers, so you can backup your PC, take the USB drive to the next PC, and back it up as well.
That manual step causes the problem. Actually, there are three problems with this option for even the smallest office backup environment.
For an individual PC, or one person with PCs at home and the office, a USB drive can, with care, do a decent backup job. Add a second or third person to the equation and all bets are off.
Backups for a business must be automatic, restorable and have an offsite feature. USB drives meet none of those requirements.
Using one USB drive to backup multiple computers means only one computer gets backed up at a time. The others take their chances. This could be a minor risk or a major one, depending on what data those computers are creating. For most people, the chore of moving the USB hard drive to backup other systems will regularly be forgotten.
Using drag and drop backups, or mediocre backup software that doesn’t track versions of saved files, means earlier backups of changed files get overwritten, never to be seen again. Sometimes companies need to see files again, as when you erase a budget spreadsheet’s contents and save it using the old name, forever erasing the budget template spreadsheet. Oops.
Using a single USB drive to backup multiple computers means you can never backup data and store it offsite. If the USB drive is connected to your computer, you have backups but no offsite storage for disaster recovery. If the drive is safe in another location, you have no backup.
Speaking of security (every technical story comes back to security sooner or later), USB drives generally aren’t secure. People leave notebook computers and PDAs and cell phones all over the place, and they will certainly lose little USB thumb drives and bigger (but still small) USB hard drives. If someone found a USB drive with your complete accounting backup, including bank account numbers along with usernames and passwords, would that cause you some grief?
Handily, some vendors now offer encryption. Kanguru has thumb drives up to 4G bytes that use solid state memory (not a hard drive) with encryption included, a smart choice if you carry business data. As an example of USB hard drive capacities and varieties, look at Pocketec with 1.8 inch hard drives up to 40G bytes and 2.5 inch hard drives up to 100G bytes, all with USB connections.
Enjoy your USB drives, as my son enjoys the one I bought him to back up his notebook at college. Just don’t think you’re going to use them to backup several computers, because it won’t happen, I promise. USB drives have their uses, but “company backup system” should never be on that list.
