External Hard for backup and storage: We are buying an external hard drive for back up and storage purposes. If we have enough capacity on the external drive, is there any reason we couldn't back up both of our systems onto the same external drive?
Software comes together with the External Hard Drive usually has certain limitation such as backing up only one computer. Hard Drive vendors want you to buy more of their products!
Beside the traditional Tape Backup, there are couple new ways to backup your computer:
1. Use Windows XP Native Backup: With your External USB or Firewire hard drive, you can back up your files and folders using Windows XP Backup. Go to Start – All Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Backup. From there you can use the Backup or Restore Wizard to select files and folders, or, you can use the “Advanced Mode” or uncheck the “Always start in wizard mode” box to give yourselves more control.
2. Use third party Software: We highly recommend hard drive imaging software such as Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. With these type of software, not only you can backup your data but also image your whole hard drive to external storage such as External USB or Firewire Hard Drive or your network. Restore data is just couple mouse click, even your hard drive is dead, you still be able to restore your operating system; your programs and your data to a new hard drive within hour.
3. Schedule On-line Backup: for businesses or users wanted to deploy hand free backup, just load a small application onto your computer and setup a backup schedule, backup will be done automatically to a data center. All data are encrypted by the users’ encryption key and restore is just couple mouse clicks away.
4. Continuous Data Protection: CDP was developed specifically with the small-to-medium business in mind. There are no tapes or disks to manage and the appliance includes simple, centralized administration. With the highest standards of reliability, data integrity and security, CDP protests your business, not just your data. If you need help on any of the above backup method, please feel free to contact us for more details.