Do you have a backup?  If not, external hard drives are an excellent solution.

Hard drive failures on workstations and laptops are commonplace.  Thumb drives and the solid state hard drives found in netbooks are notorious for their frequent failures as well.  It's critical to ensure that should one of these failures come along, your business hasn't lost priceless data or work in progress that represents a large investment.  External hard drives are a great fit for a small business backup solution.
 

Hard drives – easy on the wallet

When investing in a backup solution, price is often a huge factor for small businesses. Small businesses usually have a slim budget just to get their IT systems up and running, let alone backed-up.  External hard drives fit the bill here. You can purchase a reasonably-sized external hard drive for between $50 to $150. This is pricier than using recordable CDs, which only cost pennies, but the extra investment will allow you to store approximately 1000 CDs worth of data on your hard drive.  By comparison a tape drive (which looks like your old cassette recorder on steroids), the classic backup solution, runs around 500 dollars and roughly 50 dollars for each storage tape. 
 

Hard drives – easy backup

Convenience is another key for any data backup solution.  If it isn't easy and quick, there's a risk that it won't be completed. Imagine the disappointment of investing in a backup solution, only to find that it didn't help when a data loss event occurred. External hard drives are champions of convenience.  Connected to a USB port, which can be found on any computer, data can be saved to the external drive as easily as saving to the computer's internal hard drive. CDs offer similar ease of connectivity, but consider that if you have 100 Gigabytes to backup (conservatively), that means you'll have to burn over 150 CDs. There is a device called a CD feeder (it looks like something out of the Transformers), but mastering and storing a CD feeder isn't very convenient.
 

Hard drives – easy restore

The funny thing about creating a backup is that you hope you never have to use it. Should you ever find the need to restore some or all of your data, the convenience of restoring your data from the backup is very important. External hard drives make this process a cinch. Simply connect the drive via the USB port and copy the desired files onto the computer's hard drive. Unlike CDs, you won't need to sort through hundreds of disks to find the appropriate one. Likewise, you have the ability to restore only a few files quickly. With tape drives you would have to fast forward and rewind through your backup in order to find the appropriate files. It's also likely that the computer you're restoring to doesn't have the tape drive, so now you have to involve a third step.  This might be acceptable if you're restoring a server over a weekend, but not if you are restoring a presentation for a key client just before the meeting because your computer died.
 

Backing up the backup

With an external hard drive backup in place you should feel safe, right?  Not so fast. What about a Katrina-scale disaster?  What about the next H1N1?  All threats should be accounted for when backing up data. Consider that, at least periodically, a backup should be safeguarded by being moved to an altogether different geography. This prevents events like hurricane-related flooding from destroying your backup. It also ensures that your backup is safe from factors that might preclude you from retrieving your data from an area, like quarantine. There are many businesses that specialize in backup storage. A safety deposit box in another location is a good mix of cost and security. If there isn't any budget for these options, a backup can be secured in the home of a friend or relative. Regardless whether your backup is on CDs, tapes, or an external hard drive, make sure you've got one and store a copy off-site so that come what may, your business stays focused on the mission.

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