A recent trend in backup technology is the jump drive, a small USB device that utilizes flash memory to store up to around a gigabyte of information. These are ideal for small amounts of data backup, as they can easily handle a good amount of documents, they’re more rugged than hard drives, and they fit on your keychain. As an experiment, I bought one of these drives to see how much damage it could take; I threw it across the room, dropped it, and even smacked it against my desk. It still read my files. These drives do tend to overheat, however, and in general fail faster than hard drives. However, you usually wouldn’t run one as often as you ran a hard drive, so it may last a great deal longer than your computer does. Still, the amount of data it can back up is pretty limited, which makes it infeasible for many people.
Tape Drives
You remember those old Macintosh computers in the late eighties that ran off tapes that took forever to rewind and even longer to load? Well, many businesses are using similar tapes as their form of backup. The difference is that while those Mac tapes were very, very small, most newer model tapes are capable of storing hundreds of gigabytes of data. This makes tapes very efficient for companies, who can back up their whole systems and easily catalogue them. Like jump drives, tapes are very resilient, and unless they’re stored in humid or wet environments, they tend to last a great deal of time. The problems with tape drives, however, are significant. First of all, tape drives are costly, and they’re not standardized. This means you’ll have to select which tape type to use, which can be a confusing process. Tape drives, though resilient, also fail, and data recovery on tapes is often more costly than on hard drives. Tapes take a long time to write to. And remember those long rewinding and loading times? Well, uh…ditto.