Tuesday 1 July, 2008

Backup Using USB Flash Memory (Pen) Drives

No, am not joking, Seriously, the cheap and common pen drives have the following advantages as a backup storage media:

  1. They are simple to use and understand

    A best backup solution is one that you can understand well and follow regularly. USB Flash drives are very simple to use and even non-technies know how to use them.

  2. They are cheap

    With 2GB and 8GB pen drives available at reasonable prices, you can use them to backup your important data files. Most important files like text documents, spreadsheets, pdfs, database files of line of business applications etc can be accommodated in this size capacity. You may not be able to use them to backup your entire computer though.


  3. No driver / drive problem

    When recovering the files, you need not bother about the driver for the USB Drive. Most systems with latest OSs support them out of the box. With tape backups, you need tape drives on the system you are planning to restore to.

  4. They can be stored easily

    When it comes to compactness, there is no beating the pen drives. You can compactly and securely store them unlike tapes.

  5. They can be erased and re-used.

    Unlike CDs or DVDs, you can erase or update the files on them. This is great if you just need the updated copy of your data and do not require archival.