Reliable backup best safeguard for data

At a conference last month I watched a stall-holder offering his handout on a floppy disc. There were few takers. Many people pointed out that they no longer had a floppy drive in their machine, so could not read it.

Four or five years ago floppies were a common and acceptable way to share documents. Today, a CD or even just a web link are the main data-sharing options.

Data backup is another question. Few people would have come though the past decade without some digital data failure, and caution is healthy.

Every new generation of digital storage requires you to go back and copy everything over. Skip a couple of generations and you could be in trouble, wandering the streets looking for someone who can help get that important letter you thoughtfully archived on that floppy disc - which really were floppy - all those years ago.

It didn't seem so hard. All those floppies probably fitted on one or two zip discs. When you got the burner you transferred the box-load of expensive zip discs onto a CD.

Where does it end though, especially with digital and video photography generating greater amounts of essential personal and professional data that needs storing.

The present bet seems to be some kind of hard disc, with tape archiving still an important part of corporate procedure.

Peter Lowden, a consulting engineer at integrator and outsourcer Axon Computer Systems, says many people are adopting USB keys for their day-to-day personal backups.

"They are relatively cheap at about $150 for one gigabyte of flash storage and you can plug them into any computer," Lowden says.

"The more technically oriented people use portable hard discs which they plug into the USB port.

"The really cool toy for media-savvy people is the laptop hard drive with a viewer built in, which can be used to view photos of MPEGs.

"Some of them have flash-card readers built in."

Lowden does a lot of digital camera work so is constantly on the lookout for cost-competitive storage.

"I don't trust CDs," says. "I always used to make two copies, but you could burn a CD, put it in a proper wallet and put it in a draw for six months in an air-conditioned building, then pull it out and not be able to read it - and there would be no indication why it failed."

Now he takes his flash memory card from the camera and plugs it into a portable hard drive, which sucks out the data.

As major consumer electronics companies like Sony and Epson get into the drive market, costs will come down.

Epson has the P-1000, a 10Gb portable hard disc with 9.5cm screen, for US$399 ($575) and a 40Gb version for US$499 ($720). Sony's 40 G HDPS-M1 hard disc photo storage unit costs US$399 but has no screen.

Archos offers a 20Gb hard disc which is smaller than a floppy disc.

Many individuals now elect to store backup copies on the web, using services providers here or overseas.

Lowden says tape still has a place in storage. "At Axon we only stage to disc, then do a backup to tape which is stored off-site.

"That is what we recommend to customers."

Storage sales are booming. Graeme Muller, country manager for research firm International Data Corporation, says that in the first nine months of last year, 2.15 million Gb of disc storage was shipped in New Zealand, 92 per cent more than the same period in 2003.

Roger Cockayne, chief executive of storage specialists Hosting and Datacentre Services (HdS), says companies plan to offer archive storage to small businesses and individuals, but more development is needed.

HdS experimented last year with Databunker, a $20-a-month backup service for individuals.

"We were overtaken by technology," Cockayne says.

"For that sort of price you could go out and get a backup storage device for home where you would have more control."

Even without a multimillion-dollar data centre, people can protect themselves. "Always remember that the archive copy of data is the primary copy, and for every bit you archive, you keep a back-up.

"The archive is the primary that has moved to cheaper media.

"The biggest issue with managing business levels of data is knowing where is it, so you can recover it and then read it."

Cockayne says that being able to read archives is a major issue, because tape manufacturers have different formats.

"CD and DVD are not doing badly - they are sticking to standards."