2. Where To Store

Current notebook designs incorporate a variety of basic storage connections and capabilities to provide a wealth of backup strategies for resourceful end-users. Here are a few storage devices that can be used for backups:

A secondary storage drive is perhaps the most obvious location for backing up. Most notebooks offer only one internal drive, so it's more likely you'll use an external drive, such as a USB or Firewire unit. As an added plus, many such devices come bundled with their own backup software. Instead of those massive externals, look for the smaller notebook-oriented devices that use 2.5" disk drives. Then you won't hesitate to take these featherweights along when you go on the road with your notebook. ZIP and especially tape backup devices have a longstanding tradition for servicing scheduled and on-demand backups. That said tape and ZIP drives haven't kept up with modern drive capacities. ZIP disks top out at 750 MB, and affordable tape drives seldom accommodate more than 36 to 72 GB per tape, when rated in uncompressed versus compressed capacities. With new hard 2.5" notebook disks topping 100 GB nowadays, and some offering up to 160 GB, these alternative technologies are not as attractive as they once were, but may still be found in many home and small business offices today. PC-Card drives provide a secondary mass storage device through a notebook's peripheral component connection, the PCMCIA slot. You may typically associate this slot with some form of modem, adapter card or pluggable input/output device but it can also serve as an auxiliary storage slot. Writable DVD or CD media make excellent backup choices where adequate electrical power is available; you'll want to be drawing from a wall socket during the backup to be sure. Otherwise, this backup strategy can pose serious power-consumption problems when multiple drive spindles (both for the hard disk and optical medium) are active at the same time. You'll need media burning software or backup software that is aware of and can write to these media. Built-in Compact Flash/SD/MMC/MS card readers are available in almost all of today's notebooks. With plug-in storage media of 8 GB now available, and 4 GB quite affordable, quick and reasonable notebook backups using memory cards are now entirely feasible. Even if they're not well-suited for large amounts of data, 4 to 8 GB is plenty to capture the operating system, system state information, and key data files. Network backups historically have been used in networked business environments, where notebooks link up with centralized company servers to push backup data to a server drive. Home users can accomplish the same end by utilizing disk space on another networked computer or a networked storage drive, along with shared windows folders and an appropriate backup tool.