Heloise Montini
Heloise Montini is a content writer whose background in journalism make her an asset when researching and writing tech content. Also, her personal aspirations in creative writing and PC gaming make her articles on data storage and data recovery accessible for a wide audience.
Laura Pompeu
With 10 years of experience in journalism, SEO & digital marketing, Laura Pompeu uses her skills and experience to manage (and sometimes write) content focused on technology and business strategies.
Bogdan Glushko
CEO at SalvageData Recovery, Bogdan Glushko has over 18 years of experience in high-security data recovery. Over the years, he's been able to help restore data after logical errors, physical failures, or even ransomware attacks, for individuals, businesses, and government agencies alike.
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Photo galleries, client records, company financials, documents, databases, etc. Every type of data needs at least three things: storage space, security, and backups. And to ensure these you must choose the right backup medium for your data.
Sensitive information is constantly vulnerable due to the fragile nature of external drives and the unreliable nature of the internet our systems entirely depend on. This means that whatever main storage medium you choose, you need a different backup medium to safeguard against data loss and ensure data redundancy.
Regular backups are essential for any business and individuals and should be a primary concern.
Source: The 2022 Backup Survey by Backblaze.
2018 Backup Awareness survey
Common backup medium
When backing up your files, you must decide the device medium that best fits your needs. The question here is, “What kind of data are you storing?”. The answer will tell if you require a self-encrypt drive, a fast drive, or one with a lot of space.
As the future of data storage is not yet available to everyone, defining a goal is the only way to find the right backup device medium.
Once you define your goal, you can check each type of storage device available and define the best option for you.
Online backup services and Cloud drives
A file syncing service with a good amount of free storage is a great option to start with when a lot of your most important information is placed on computers.
A huge advantage of online services is flexibility. You can scale the capacity of storage to meet your requirements. Finally, this option is also very affordable (it doesn’t include purchasing any hardware, and you only pay for the space in use).
In order to provide maximum security to your cloud account, make sure you use strong passwords and change them regularly. Also, it’s indispensable to encrypt all the sensitive files before putting them in the cloud.
This method is advantageous for both businesses and individual users.
SSDs
From one of the oldest ways to store data to one of the most recent. Solid-state drives are fast, reliable, and portable, and you can randomly access the data on them.
However, SSDs have a high cost per gigabyte. Meaning that the more data you need to back up, the more you’ll spend on an SSD.
This drawback of solid-state drives makes them not the best backup medium for businesses, but individuals can trust their photos and files to this technology.
If you’re a business, then you can try to use your RAID with SSD as a backup option.
Also, their high read/write speed makes SSDs the best choice for creative professionals and gamers.
You may also like Best External Hard Drive Or SSD: Which Is The Best One For You.
Hard drives
Hard drives are made of moving parts, which makes them more delicate and prone to physical damage than SSDs.
But, they cost less per gigabyte than solid-state drives. Also, modern hard drives have a high read and write speed, although still inferior to SSDs. But, HDDs are a good data backup medium for businesses and individuals. You can also check our guide on best HDD updated with 2024 devices. The list selects the best hard drive for different purposes.
It has a good cost-benefit, and you can find options for HDDs for any need of storage capacity. Also, you can find several options for self-encrypting hard drives, which adds an extra layer of protection to your data.
As a backup medium, you can use external hard drives or a RAID system. Although, we do recommend that you keep the last option as an off-site backup.
Magnetic Tape
Magnetic tape backup remains an option since it can store a large amount of data at very little cost.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that tapes are better suited for backing up or restoring an entire system in one go. That’s because magnetic tapes store data linearly, meaning you can’t randomly open files.
However, you can find magnetic tapes with up to 580 TB storage capacity for those who need a lot of data space for their backups. Meaning, businesses can have a better use for tape backup than individuals.
Flash Drive
Flash drives are small, portable devices that allow you to store data locally. They have a smaller cost in comparison with other backup medium technologies, making them a popular choice.
The drawback is that USB flash drives are a not-so-trustful device for permanent data storage. That’s because they are more susceptible to damage. Besides, you can easily lose them due to their size.
One more con for USB drives is that they don’t have much larger capacity options. Then, again, this would be an option for individuals trying to keep their files and photos safe and at hand.
Especially because USB drives have a great advantage, which is how practical they are when you need to transfer a small amount of data from one physical place to another.
Backup methods
Although backing up to one of the above mediums is not very different from backing up your computer to an external hard drive, you still have to decide which method to use.
For example, you can clone your entire system (system backup), or you can select files and folders to back up (partial backup).
The 3-2-1 backup strategy
The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a way specialists found that can increase your data protection.
The method is:
- 3 copies of your data
- Stored on 2 different storage media
- With 1 copy off-site
The three copies of the data are the original and two backups. These backups must be updated. The best way would be to schedule regular backups. You can, for example, have automatic backups of your system into your cloud service.
Once you use at least two different mediums, for example, SSDs and tape, you minimize the chances of errors and failures. And when you put one of these in an off-site place, you increase your data security. This way, if anything happens to your building, such as a fire or flood, you still have a copy of the data in second place.
Quick Summary
Choosing the right backup medium is important to guarantee your data is secure. Also, it can prevent you from investing in a storage device that doesn’t fit your needs.
Unfortunately, disasters happen and a storage drive fails. If even after taking every precaution and using the 3-2-1 backup strategy you discover missing files, you can contact SalvageData experts for an emergency data recovery service.
