Computer Associates’ ARCserve

It can be quite cumbersome and tiring to take backups for data accumulated over the period of time. Your music files, documents, important information is mostly customized its according to your needs. It can be quite frustrating to lose them same in case of a system crash. Thus is it vital to take periodic backups of your important data files.

Traditionally, backup in commercial offices has been on backup media such as magnetic disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs, etc. When the office administrator decided to backup the data, he had to close all open applications and take the backup of all files in the office server. If there were branches of a company spread over a large area, then in each branch there would be a person who would religiously take the backups.

The cheapest way to backup your data is to use external devices like CD/DVD or USB drives.
Let us consider the features of the external media currently available:

1. CD-ROM Disks: One of the cheapest backup media available, the CD can store about 700 MB of data. One can easily store data on a CD with the help of CD-writers which are common in most computers available today.
2. DVD-ROM Disks: These are a bit costlier than CDs but considering that one DVD disk can store 4.2 GB of data; the cost per GB is less as compared to CD.
3. USB Drive: Falling memory prices have made these backup media very cost effective. The additional advantage of these drives is that they can be reused many times unlike the CD/DVD. The only drawback is that usually a USB drive is required on the computer which may not be present in all computers.