Storage World

If you want a more comprehensive method of backing up your data that will take up more space but is more foolproof and automated then you can use an automated backup tool. Note that if you are having any sort of system problems or quirky behavior, I do not recommend using this method to backup your data and settings. Any automated tool will typically capture and transfer the same problems you experienced before onto your new install of Windows XP, defeating the whole purpose of doing a fresh install of XP. Only use these methods if you aren’t experiencing any problems and have trouble‐free performance.

Windows Backup Utility

You can access the Backup Utility by going to Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Backup or by going to Start>Run and typing ntbackup and pressing Enter. Windows XP Home users will not have access to the Backup utility by default, but it can be manually installed from the Windows XP Home CD. Basically it involves inserting the Windows XP CD into your drive, opening Windows Explorer, going to the \VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP\directory on the Windows CD and double‐clicking on the Ntbackup.msi file to start installation of it.

The Backup Utility has several methods of usage, but essentially it involves the following steps:

1. Run the Backup Utility and click the Advanced Mode link to switch to a more customizable method of backing up.

2. Go to the Backup tab, and put a tick in the boxes next to the directories that you want to back up.

3. Select the System State box if you want to ensure all the additional system settings relating to your setup are backed up as well, for example Registry settings etc. Alternatively, if you don’t want to save these as well, maybe you want to restore your backups onto a clean install of Windows, then don’t tick the System State box.

4. Click the Browse button at the bottom, and select the destination for the backup. This is usually another hard drive given the amount of data involved; the Backup utility cannot backup to CDs/DVDs.

5. Click the Start Backup button to commence backing up. The process may take quite some time depending on how many directories you chose to back up, and the type of medium to which they are being transferred.

6. To restore this backup in the future, run the Backup utility again, but this time under Advanced Mode click the Restore Wizard button and follow the prompts.

The Backup utility has many more options and methods for backing up, so go through the options for configuring the utility under the Tools>Options menu in Backup.

The drill goes something like this: after getting perilously close to running out of hard disk space, you leap into spring cleaning mode and begin furiously corralling all of your important files in preparation for a marathon DVD burning session.

Wouldn’t life be easier if you could just chuck a larger hard drive in your computer and it would update itself, without any effort? The Drobo external USB storage device allows you to do exactly that. Sound enticing? It gets better. The Drobo uses RAID-like redundancy, so your data is also protected against drive failure. If a hard drive goes south, your data is still safe because it is stored across all remaining drives.

This seemingly magical feature does exact a price though: you have to populate the Drobo with considerably more gigabytes than what shows up as available to you on your Mac’s desktop.

Storage compartment
The drives snap into place and are held by a retaining lever that also helps eject them. Each drive bay features a status LED that changes colour (to red, yellow, or green) or blinks according to what’s happening with that particular drive. Any drive with a green LED can be removed without affecting the Drobo’s operation. A row of 10 blue LEDs along the bottom front of the Drobo’s exterior provides an indication of the current space left.

To get a ballpark estimate for how much usable capacity you can expect to get from four drives, add the total capacity of the three smallest drives. Getting the Drobo up and running is as easy as could be, courtesy of a large, illustrated quick-setup card that greets you as you open the box. Although installing the Drobo’s supplied Dashboard utility isn’t necessary to begin using the drive bay, the utility delivers critical alerts when the Drobo requires your attention. It also provides a pie-chart view of how much storage is actually available. The only disappointment is that you can fill it up with speedy SATA drives, only to be hamstrung by the relatively pokey performance of the USB connection.

Macworld buying advice
Devices with built-in smarts have become pervasive, and the Drobo’s storage robot moniker pays tribute to its behind the scenes activities. However, calling it a robot seems a bit of a stretch. The Drobo’s use of USB rather than the much faster FireWire 800 limits it to the niche of personal desktop storage, and if you’re in an environment where you routinely share large data files with others, then look elsewhere. However, if you’re after a safe and easy personal backup solution, the Drobo is an attractive solution.

There are nearly as many ways to back up your business data as there are ways to lose the data and require that backup. Products available to perform archiving duties range from the venerable tape backup to newer technologies such as hard drive, CD, and DVD, or even remote storage facilities. No matter which you select, the principles of data backup are the same, and it’s important to understand which data needs to get backed up, how often, and for how long.

The first step is pure common sense, yet it is frequently skipped: Conduct a thorough analysis and inventory of existing systems with a focus on data storage. It will be tedious, but you need to catalog the location, owner, and importance of each bit of data.

The alternative is to back up everything, wasting time by writing extraneous files and wasting money on extra media. That total backup solution is what a lot of so-called experts advise, probably because they take advice from companies looking to sell more tapes. But you may not have to do it.

A good place to start is simply by listing the directories on each server or storage device in a spreadsheet and then adding columns for the type of data in that directory, the owner and whether they are essential to your business. In a more complex environment, for example, an online business that has no off-hours, add another column for a time when no one is using the file and it can be backed up.

This brings up an interesting question: What is essential to your business? For a simple answer, ask yourself, If I lose that file, could I lose money? Note that the question is could rather than would; this casts a wider net, better safe than sorry. Next consider your backup schedule; there’s a whole theory and science to backup rotations.

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Your small or mid size business will get a whopping 3TB of storage from the four hot-swappable 750GB SATA II drives in the Iomega StorCenter 150d and the price is certainly right. The NAS device which uses an embedded Linux operating system, supports external USB drives which has two ports in the front and two in back, also has a Gigabit Ethernet port in the back.

The included and easy-to-use management console software comes in both Windows and Mac versions and lets you perform the setup, a simple process from any PC on the network. The 150d fully supports Linux, Mac, and Windows file shares as well as Active Directory, so you can import users and groups from an Active Directory store. And IT professional will like the way you can make any share available in multiple protocols: By simply checking a box, you can open the NAS to AFP, FTP, and NFS in addition to CICS.

What you won’t find is the easy OS update capability or advanced reporting and logging that a Windows Storage Server system provides. And while the 150d proved very fast on write operations over a Gigabit network, managing 26-MBps and 17.2MBps throughput with 32MB and 1GB files, respectively, read numbers were mixed (22.4 MBps and 13 MBps). Overall, though, the box performs more than acceptably. That, along with the huge capacity and very reasonable price, makes it a definite recommendation for SMBs needing a big storage resource for standard business duties.

View for more: Iomega 33610 StorCenter Pro 150d Series I TB NAS Server

If you just want a cheap media-serving and Web-sharing solution, you will get it with the LaCie Ethernet Disk mini–Home Edition. The hardware, which is LaCie’s and the software (HipServ from Axentra) come from different sources, but LaCie needs to do a much better job of integrating the two. Also, the dismal installation process needs lots improvement.

Still, the slick HipServ software offers better sharing and media serving than Windows Home Server. The HipServ portal combines private and public features. You can publish content and restrict access to users with accounts on your NAS. Via a contact database, you can also assign shares to others and even send e-mails inviting people to see new content. Considering the unit’s low cost, performance is adequate, varying from an average write throughput of 14.1 Mbps with 32MB files to 10 Mbps with 1GB files. Read speed went from a little over 18 Mbps to 12.5.

LaCie’s offering lower price, but relying on just one drive limits expandability, and more important, redundancy. For folks who can’t spend more than $200 on home network storage and need only a single-disk storage bin, the LaCie might be the way to go. But if you need data redundancy, look elsewhere.

Click more: LaCie 301138U Ethernet Disk Mini 500 GB Ethernet/USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

The RX81-MP-SC is a hot-swappable external hard drive enclosure made of heat-dissipating aluminum. Designed to reside in an office rather than a laptop case, the RX81-MP-SC is somewhat bulky (13.5 x 22.5 x 3.5cm [HxWxD]) and requires a separate power adapter. This probably isn’t an enclosure you’ll be toting around.

The device supports hard drives up to 1TB, although you’ll have to purchase a hard drive separately. Installing a drive in the RX81-MP-SC was somewhat time-consuming. You had to remove two screws to get the outside case apart, four to get in to the enclosure, and then another four to secure the hard drive to the case for the installation. However, the hard drive itself popped right in without any fuss. Once the whole thing back together, the unit worked immediately.

There was no software to install; the plug-and-play feature worked smoothly. The Seagate drive used for test was NTFS, but the enclosure also supports Mac OS 8.6 and above, as well as Linux 2.4.1.0 and above, so you can format a drive to use the RX81-MP-SC with just about any system. The variety of ports adds to the RX81-MP-SC’s format friendliness. You can connect the enclosure to a computer or network hub via five different interfaces from USB 1.1 to eSATA, so the device will work with computers young and old.

Kingston’s KHX14400D3K2/2G kit couldn’t be more different. The most obvious is the KHX14400D3K2/2G kit’s rated frequency of 1,800MHz, with default timings of 8-8-8-24 at 1.9V. It’s equipped with the company’s latest heat spreader design (Kingston also ditched the Elpida chips from its earlier kits in favor of Micron’s) and has plenty of overclocking headroom. Whereas the 1,375MHz KHX11000D3LLK2 and ULK2 kits weren’t capable of hitting the 1.5GHz mark, the KHX14400D3K2/2G soared to 1,940MHz with a slight bump in voltage to 2V.

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With an Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard and a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6750 processor, the KHX14400D3K2/2G kit offered just over 8GBps of bandwidth, according to SiSoft SANDRA XII, when running at its rated frequency. Once overclocked the kit to 1.94GHz, however, the kit’s peak bandwidth shot up to 9.2GBps. The experimented with different CAS latencies and found that the Kingston kit was capable of hitting slightly tighter 7-7-7-24 timings, when cranked its voltage to 2V.

With a street price is quite reasonable and performance that’s on par with competing offerings, the Kingston KHX14400D3K2/2G looks quite attractive. It’s still expensive relative to highspeed DDR2 memory, but compared to other 1,800MHz DDR3 kits, the KHX14400D3K2/2G is a bargain.

Read more at Kingston HyperX – Memory – 2 GB ( 2 x 1 GB ) – DIMM 240-pin – DDR3 – 1800 MHz – CL8 – 1.9 V – unbuffered – non-ECC

NAS appliances offer you the storage advantages of a home file server without the need for a second PC, ideal if you want an always-on device to share and back up large collections of videos, music, or photos. The Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo is a 1TB (two 500GB, 7,200rpm SATA drives) NAS appliance that supports a RAID 0 or 1 configuration. It features several other networking goodies, including a built-in Web server with free remote access from www.buffalonas.com, an integrated FTP server, and support for UPS connectivity.

The black-clad LinkStation Pro Duo weighs in at 6.8 pounds, and at 3.9 inches wide, it was easy to find a place for the NAS device near our router. It features a Gigabit Ethernet port, and Buffalo includes setup software that configures the NAS to your network. After running the configuration software, you open a Web-based GUI to configure the network features of the LinkStation Pro Duo. To set up remote Web access, we only had to click the Web Access button, select Service Setup, and choose Enable; the LinkStation Pro Duo then configured the firewall on the UPnP router and registered itself on the Buffalo Web site. For remote streaming, the Buffalo Web service has an integrated Flash player to let you stream audio files from the NAS to PCs and mobile phones.

The NAS comes with an Auto/Manual power switch; when set in Auto mode, the LinkStation Pro Duo senses Buffalo’s NAS Navigator software (installed with the setup software) to let the unit turn on and off based on the power conditions of the computers in your network. The original LinkStation Pro Duo sent to us couldn’t use the Auto power function (Buffalo thought the unit may have been damaged in shipping), so Buffalo sent us a second model that responded to the power status of our PC.

Overall, most people like the features found in the LinkStation Pro Duo, and its price tag is affordable for a terabyte of networked storage.

Read more at 1TB Linkstation Pro Duo Nas Gbe 2X 500GB Raid 0 1 Web Access

Despite its menacing, the Iomega Desktop Hard Drive Triple 400GB, Platinum Series will charm you with its roomy 400GB capacity and abundant connection options.

The external drive attaches to your PC via FireWire 400, FireWire 800, or USB 2.0. Although FireWire performance was swift, USB speeds were extremely disappointing. To take advantage of the FireWire 800 capability, you’ll need an adapter card such as the Adaptec FireConnect
8300 or the Belkin FireWire 800 3-Port PCI Card.

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