Home Tech Guide Ways to Archive Your Data

Ways to Archive Your Data

0
Ways to Archive Your Data

In recent years as data has begun to take up more and more space, so we are in situations where we can’t keep all of it in our possession. The best way to tackle this obstacle is to archive the data.

Backup versus Archive

An often mistake a lot of people to make that backing up and archiving your data is the same. They are similar, but there is one difference: the type of data that it’s included in the process. When you back up your data, you usually backup the data that you use often and need to access it instantly. For that purpose, you back up your data to the cloud. If you archive your data, you do that to the data that you no longer use or access it rarely.

For this purpose, the procedures or locations for backup or archive are different. We mentioned that you would normally back up your data on the cloud. When it comes to archiving, there are other ways to do it.

Hard drive

The hard drive is the most commonly used file archiving solution. The reason for this is that hard drives are easily accessible and relatively cheap. The negative sides to using hard drives are the fact that they take up space and are delicate. That means that you will need to keep them somewhere where it is unlikely that you drop them. Here are a few tips on how to take care of your hard drives.

Flash Drive

Similar to the hard drives, the flash storage is another often used way to archive your data.  Unlike the hard drives, the thumb drives are not as fragile. On the other hand, they are a lot more expensive, so it is not recommended to use them as a file archiving solution for large files.

Disks

Even though using disks is a thing of the past; still, they are used in some cases. The most common usage is for movies or shows and sometimes photos. The main advantages that the disks have are that they are cheap and can also be used on any kind of media device. The downside is that they can be scratched easily, making the data written on them unreadable.

Tapes

The LTO tapes are the least used file archiving solution. The most commonly used application is with companies that need to archive large amounts of data. The initial investment is high, but for companies that are looking to archive large amounts of data, it pays off because the price per terabyte is a lot lower than any other solution.

Precautions

Regardless of the typical media that you archive your data, there are a few things that you need to be aware of. All of them are susceptible to damage, so if you are archiving on a physical drive be sure to “protect” it from it. Store them somewhere safe and try to keep them in a place that the temperature is steady and not too hot. No matter how durable the media seem, the electronic parts can degrade over time if the temperature is not controlled. If you go for a hard drive, it is recommendable to plug them in and power them up every once in a while.

Another thing to keep in mind are the ports used in the archive media. For example, people that archived their data on older hard drives with IDE ports might have problems plugging them on modern machines. If you archive on physical drives, either keep a machine at hand with that port or transfer your archived data to newer drives.

Conclusion

Choosing the right file archiving solution depends on you and your needs. One thing to bear in mind is the data that you need to archive and how to store it.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here