Home networks can be equipped with a solid backup system for a fairly low cost.

Question

Home networks can be equipped with a solid backup system for a fairly low cost. Considering how much personal and sentimental data people keep on their home computers these days, and yet how poorly most of these systems are protected and maintained, having a good backup system in place can be well worth the expense. In this project, you research inexpensive backup options.

1. Backups can be kept on external hard drives, flash drives, disks, or in the cloud. Research these options at a high level first, listing pros and cons of each type of backup.

2. Select the type of backup that you feel is most secure and reasonable for your situation, then research at least three products that would provide that service. List pros and cons, cost, and features. Which product would you choose and why?

Explanation / Answer

This is a world of high technology in which fierce competition reigns, with conflict over everything from resources to religion.Rapid development of technology is valued as a means of enhancing security. It is a world of trade blocs and protectionism, slowing the distribution of resources worldwide and eventually slowing growth - and making it potentially very unequal between economies.Insecurity is real, not just a high perception of insecurity.This scenario finds the military driving R&D and innovation in search of greater security, yet security is in reality
much worse than today. The high level of insecurity drives the world into introverted blocs. Among other
flashpoints, resource-hungry economies such as China and Japan are drawn into conflict as they attempt to secure their supply lines in a global economy that is initially growing fast and where sustaining growth depends increasingly on the power of the bloc to attract the Fast, Free & Filthy. “This is an alternative high-tech world in which environmental concerns come to the fore, having started with fast, conflict-free growth that ignores the costs of environmental degradation. Eventually, technological innovation is called upon to combat pollution and overcome resource constraints, allowing growth to continue apace in the long run. This scenario avoids conflict through
global political cooperation rather than confrontation - with resources and the environment key areas for action. For example, despite massive demand for water, potential water wars are averted through good-faith treaties, the sharing of resources, development of new clean water supplies, advanced desalination technology. Renewable energy is developing rapidly.” Scenario.

Computer storage is measured in bytes, kilobytes (KB), megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB) and increasingly terabytes (TB). One byte is one character of information, and is comprised of eight bits (or eight digital 1's or 0's). Technically a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a megabyte 1024 kilobytes, a gigabyte 1024 megabytes, and a terabyte 1024 gigabytes. This said, whilst this remains true when it comes to a computer's internal RAM and solid state storage devices (like USB memory sticks and flash memory cards), measures of hard disk capacity often take 1MB to be 1,000,000 bytes (not 1,024,768 bytes) and so on. This means that the storage capacity of two devices
labelled as the same size can be different, and which remains an ongoing source of debate within the computer industry.

Any sensible computer user will plan for two categories of storage. These will comprise the storage necessary to keep files internally on their computer, as well as those media required to back-up, transfer and archive data
In turn, when deciding on suitable external storage devices, the key questions to be asked should be how much data actually needs to be stored, and whether the external data archive will be subject to random-access or incremental change.

STORAGE CAPACITY AND REQUIREMENTS

If a computer user is usually only going to create word processor documents and spreadsheets, then most of their files will probably be in the order of a few hundred KB or maybe occasionally a few MB in size. If, however, a computer is being used to store and manipulate digital photographs, then average file sizes will be in the region of several MB in size (and potentially tens of MB if professional digital photography is being conducted). Yet another level of storage higher, if a computer is being used to edit and store video, individual file sizes will probably be measured in hundreds of MB or even a few GB. For example, an hour of DV format video footage consumes about
12GB of storage. Non-compressed video requires even more space -- for example 2GB for every minute of standard definition footage, and 9.38GB for each minute of non-compressed 1920x1080 high definition video. Knowing what a computer is going to be used for is hence very important when planning storage requirements.

In addition to capacity requirements, whether the data in a user's back-up archive will have to change in a random-access or incremental fashion can be a critical factor in the choice of external storage devices. A digital photographer, for example, will probably have incremental back-up requirements where each time they complete a shoot they will want to take a back-up of several hundred MB or a few GB of photographs that will subsequently never change. In other words they will want to keep a permanent record of an historical digital state of the world. Writing data like photographs to write-once media (such as CD-R or DVD-R as discussed below) would hence be perfectly acceptable. The photographer's total archive may be hundreds of GB in size, but would only be added to incrementally with previously stored data never being changed.

HARD DISK STORAGE

Spinning hard disk (HD) drives are today the most common means of high capacity computer storage, with most desktop and laptop computers still relying on a spinning hard disk to store their operating system, applications programs and at least some user data. Traditional,spinning hard disk drives consist of one or more disk "platters" stacked one above the other, and coated in a magnetic media that is written to and read by the drive heads. As discussed in the hardware section, hard disk drives can transfer data directly to other computer hardware via a range of three interface types (SATA, IDE/UDMA, or SCSI) and come in a range of speeds from 4200 to 15000 revolutions per minute (RPM).

EXTERNAL HARD DISKS

Except where two internal hard disks are considered essential on the basis of performance, a second hard disk is today most advisably connected as an external unit, or what is sometimes now known as a "DAS" or direct attached storage drive. DAS external hard disks connect via a USB, firewire or an E-SATA interface (see the hardware section), with USB being the most common. The highest quality external hard drives routinely include at least two of these interfaces as standard, hence maximising their flexibility for moving data between different
computers. As explained in the networking section, today some external hard disks can also be purchased as NAS devices that can easily be shared between users across a network.

OPTICAL DISK STORAGE

Almost all optical storage involves the use of a 5" disk from which data is read by a laser. Optical media can be read only write-one, or rewritable, and currently exists in one of three basic formats. These are compact disk (CD), digital versatile disk (DVD)and Blu-Ray disk (BD). A fourth format called High-Definition DVD (HD DVD) is now dead-in-the-water.

Compact disk is a very mature, low-cost and reliable storage media particularly well suited for most personal computer users for incremental data archiving, as well as for the physical exchange of moderate-sized qualities of data. Writable compact disks can be either CD-R (which are a write-one media) or CD-RW (to which data can be written and erased typically a few hundred times). The storage capacity of a compact disk is up to about 700MB for CD-R and somewhat less for CD-RW media (and depending on the format used to write the data).

    The data owner (information owner) is usually a member of management, in charge of a specific business unit, and is ultimately responsible for the protection and use of a specific subset of information.The data owner decides upon the classification of the data that he is responsible for and alters that classification if the business needs arise.
    This person is also responsible for ensuring that the necessary security controls are in place, ensuring that proper access rights are being used, defining security requirements per classification and backup requirements, approving any disclosure activities, and defining user access criteria.
    The data owner approves access requests or may choose to delegate this function to business unit managers. And it is the data owner who will deal with security violations pertaining to the data he is responsible for protecting.
    The data owner, who obviously has enough on his plate, delegates responsibility of the day-to-day maintenance of the data protection mechanisms to the data custodian.

This role is usually filled by the IT department, and the duties include performing regular backups of the data, periodically validating the integrity of the data, restoring data from backup media, retaining records of activity, and fulfilling the requirements specified in the company's security policy, standards, and guidelines that pertain to information security and data protection.

An organization needs to make sure that whoever is backing up classified data--and whoever has access
to backed-up data--has the necessary clearance level. A large security risk can be introduced if low-end technicians with no security clearance can have access to this information during their tasks. Backups contain all your data and deserve the same considerations in terms of security risk as the entire infrastructure because that is exactly what it is only in a single location, often stored as a single file and usually with little thought put into what are the risks involved with that appliance.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse H
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.