A discussion of external hard drives with disaster protection value when compared to a backup strategy is not a mutually exclusive topic. In fact, one of the best solutions is to use an external hard drive with disaster protection as the target for your backup process.
Since over 75% of all data loss is caused by hardware or system malfunction and human error, using a backup process to create a spare copy is required if critical information is to survive.
But in more than a few percent of the time, data loss happens due to natural disasters, and that is when you want your backup process to be copying your information to a target that can survive a disaster.
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The real determining factor in protecting critical information is more about how likely you are to manage a protection process, rather than the solution. For example, home users rarely backup their critical information even when backup software comes bundled with the computer operating system. In this case, a user would be advised to first protect their critical information from hardware failure. For this, purchasing a RAID 1 solution where any information is copied to at least one other hard drive can protect information from hardware problems. The user is not required to do anything that they are not already doing, that is saving information to the disk, and they have a level of protection. Over 40% of all data loss is from hardware failure.
More than a third of the time, data is lost by user error -- where a file is erased of copied over by accident. In this case, a RAID 1 system that was protecting you from hardware failure turns into your enemy since the RAID 1 system will erase or copy over the critical information on both hard drives. In this case, having time between the "copying" process is beneficial. Configuring a backup process to copy your files once a day from a RAID 1 system to an external hard drive gives you the best of both worlds. But what if you do not realize you copied over the top of a file you really needed until two or three days later? Then there are backup options and software solutions which allow you to have many version of the same file. For example if you wrote over a critical file on Monday and do not notice it until Friday, you could ask the software to retrieve a copy of the file as it looked on Monday. The trade off here is that you need to configure and manage the backup software on a regular basis, and the amount of space required depends on how many versions of a file you want to have around.
If you are good at managing a backup process that provides for revisions to files and you have installed a RAID 1 system for your primary file storage -- Is this enough? The answer is no -- not if a natural disaster happens. If you have a flood or fire -- all of the copies of your critical information stored on the RAID 1 system and on the backup external hard drive can be lost. Deciding to purchase an external hard drive with disaster protection for just a few dollars more can make a difference. With disaster proof hardware, your critical data would be protected from hardware or system malfunction, user error and natural disasters.
In conclusion, using ioSafe external hard drives with disaster protection in conjunction with a backup program can be one of the best decision you will make to protect your information in the long run.
