January, 2006

There are several external options for saving and backing up hard disks.

There are tape drives and Zip drives but, personally, I would not depend on them. Over the years I have seen too many of those things corrupt data.

External hard disks are a great option but only if your system has USB ports and your operating system is at least Windows 98 SE.

You can schedule backups to automatically go off but you have to be sure the drive is plugged in and powered on.

The advantage here is that, since USB is now a standard interface, if your system crashes you can carry the drive to another machine and still have access to your data.

LaCie makes a really nice product.

http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10033

I use this LaCie.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10511

If USB is not an option, you can mount a spare hard disk in your machine and "mirror" copy everything over every day or once a week or whenever.

With this option, if you ever have a disk crash, you just unplug the bad drive and continue to run. The only thing you lose is what you did since your last copy.

You can schedule the mirroring to go off while you are sleeping.

The cost is a drive and ~$ 40.00 for the software. It's cheap, quick and easy - just not portable like the LaCie.

There are also 'Thumb' (or 'Jump') drives. These are little things that fit in your pocket. They are comparatively expensive and they are fairly small in storage space.

Even the biggest ones, at 2 GB, are small by comparison. Again, they require USB and are probably not something you can practically consider but here's a link to see them...

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=thumb+drive&hl=en&lr=&sa=N&tab=ff&oi=froogler

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=jump+drive&hl=en&btnG=Search+Froogle&lmode=unknown

One other option is FTP.

Once that is in place, you can just send your files directly to a web server over a secure connection through the Internet...

If all else fails, you could encrypt the the data (with WinZip or something) and email it to your office. Then you can save it to the server manually.