Buying A Portable USB Hard Drive For Small Business Backups

Many small business owners are wondering whether to use portable USB drives – those pocket-sized portable storage devices -- for backup.  Here are three reasons to use portable USB hard drives for backup.  The USB portable drives are ridiculously easy to use. Many of them come programs that offer one-click backup to the drives. Installation is also simple, requiring no tools: Plug the drive into the USB cable, plug in the power supply (if needed) and Windows will recognize the drive and assign it a letter. USB has elaborate software and hardware features to make connecting any USB device just about as foolproof as possible. In addition, most backup software now supports USB devices.

The USB portable drives are quite inexpensive. The drives themselves are inexpensive, with street prices for external 250GB USB drives around $60 and 500GB drives available for less than $80. This is significantly less than most entry-level tape drives, a lot faster and there is no additional media cost.They're flexible and by definition, movable. USB portable drives are highly portable and can be used to back up several computers on the same drive simply by unplugging and moving to another computer.

My suggestion would be to purchase 2 500GB drives (Total cost under $200.) I would establish a procedure where one of the drives is used one day, the next day, use the other drive. If you had a crash on your system data drive, you could then go to your 1st USB Portable drive. It is unlikely they would both be bad, but if that did happen, then go to your alternate backup. The possibilities of all three drives being lost is astronomical (Assuming you have adequate power surge protection.) and in the absolute worst case scenario, the most you would lose is one day's data. You could always get by with only 1 backup but I personally prefer the 2 drive backup system and procedure.Western Digital MyBook USB Portable Drive

Another possibility would be again the two drives would be a Seagate Replica USB portable drive. The Replica costs a bit more but comes with automatic backup software removing from your shoulders the need to remember to backup. The Replica allows you to recall files that were accidentally deleted. There’s nothing to forget to do. So everything is always safe. * Password protection ensures that only you have access to your computer’s backed up files. * Replica automatically removes the oldest versions of files to free space. * Five-year limited warranty. * Multi-PC version includes a convenient vertically standing dock.