TheTechMatterAnswer: Japan Travel & Internet survival guide

What’s the best way to save our digital data?

January 4th, 2010
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I received a first request by a person who filled out the specific form for a new topic.

He asked me what is the most efficient storage medium for making copies of digital data. Well, there are now more or less 5 economical alternative:

- A 2.5-inch hard drive powered by USB if you need to use the media to move data frequently (for example, to see movies in a media player). Is guaranteed a fair speed of reading and an easy displacement. I suggest those with aluminum enclosures that are more robust but slightly heavier (if the drive has the “antishock from falling”  feature is even better, but at this point becomes less economical)

- If to be used for archive data, the cheapest is a 3.5-inch USB hard drive. Now they are priced really low.

- If you must use not only for archive but also as support for applications (such as editing video or software that require significantly access speed in reading and writing) then it is useful to have a Firewire 800 connection or a better eSATA. This until the models USB 3.0 are available.

- If you need speed and security the ideal are three 3.5 inches hard drives in RAID 5 with eSATA connection.

- If you need more security and archive function only, it is useful to have a NAS with three hard drives in RAID 5. In case of single 3.5-inch hard disk  disk used to store important data is always good to use DVDs as redundant copy.

There would be another cheap alternative but it requires the presence of a fast network connection over Internet: the online virtual drives , but the free ones reach only 2GiB of space. The best are: http://mozy.com/  and http://www.idrive.com/ .To solve the problem of saving the e-mails you can use Gmail (which currently offers over 7GiB of space).