Forms of Data Backup Storage
There are many different storage media today. The variety exists because each of them has various strengths and weaknesses in terms of speed, capacity, reliability, and price.
The most common form of storage is the traditional hard drive. It uses magnetic storage on a spinning disk. It is one of the most popular because it is relatively stable, inexpensive, can hold a very large capacity and is not terribly expensive.
A second common form of storage is the magnetic tape. It is usually cheaper form of storage than the hard drive, and lasts longer but it is much slower to retrieve information. Tapes are also usually much larger to hold the same amount of capacity. Because of its slowness, tapes are used almost exclusively for backups. They are not used for accessing data on the fly.
Another rather new form of storage is the flash memory. This is extremely fast, compared to most other storage media. It can also hold a large amount of data on a rather small chip. This type of storage is very reliable, with no moving parts. However, it is very expensive. Therefore, it is usually only used for small amounts of data that must be portable or accessed very frequently.
Another storage form is the optical disk, more commonly known as CDs or DVDs. These devices do not use magnetic storage, but rather store data using optical patterns that can be read by a laser. While cheaper than flash memory, it is more expensive than most other storage forms. Also, a single disk cannot usually hold very much data. Such disk also has a high failure rate if data is stored for many years. Accessing speed is better than tape, but slower than most other forms of storage.
Regardless of the medium used to store data, backups are critical to any good system of storage. This is because all are susceptible to failure given the right circumstances. Since data can be backed up to multiple sources relatively easily, it makes goods sense to store the data using different storage techniques in different locations. This ensures that if one system fails, the data can be recovered relatively easily from another location.
