Data storage solutions have never been more confusing! There are so many different technologies and options these days that it can be difficult to decipher which one would be right for you. Your best bet would be to understand at least on a fundamental level what your options are and also to evaluate your situation to see what would even be feasible.

Before making a rash decision, assess your needs and what you hope to accomplish. Then take a look at your budget and what you could afford. If you were a very small office or even a personal user, chances are that you could get away with something easy such as a Windows backup that typically comes with all Windows-based computers these days. For that matter, simple CDs, flash drives or even tape backups could work. Heck, if you had an Apple iPod and wanted to create your own iPod backup, you could easily do it yourself. However, if you have a larger environment with servers and multiple users, the outlook just got a little more complicated.

For smaller environments whether it is your home or small office, you could consider internet backups. There are many businesses online that offer online data storage and the cost is usually a monthly membership or a flat yearly price based upon a certain amount of disk space. Many individuals use this option for their image files.

Small businesses may backup onto tapes or CDs but may try and use the online computer backup option as a fail-safe. Plus, when you use online backup services, there is always the remote off-chance that their company servers fail. Therefore, a backup plan to your data storage solutions is always advised. You might consider a Cobian backup plan. This is a simple utility where you can backup your data to another part of your hard drive or even a shared drive on another computer.

But what if you are in a larger office, say a small to medium sized environment? There is something called an SMB backup which is aimed specifically for this purpose. Many times, these SMB backups are Windows based so that even someone not very experienced in data storage could accomplish the task. Also, backup exec software is growing in popularity and is mainly for Windows servers – from the SQL servers to the NT and even Exchange servers.

If your business has several servers and they each have different operating systems like UNIX, Linux and Windows, one data storage solution you could use with all of these operating server systems is the Samba backup. It uses a TCP/IP protocol for creating backups. Then there is the LVM backup. This stands for Linux Volume Manager. Instead of relying on expensive, bulky tape drives, you could have multiple large data storage hard drives instead. This LVM backup treats these drives almost like tape backups, only they are more reliable.

If you have a Linux server, you could rely on the Linux backup software for your Linux backups. Linux is user friendly but not exactly compatible with Windows. You definitely would need a data storage solution that was proprietary to Linux if at all possible.

Finally, you have to determine if you also need backup encryption for your data storage solutions. Is your information you are backing up proprietary, privacy-sensitive or classified? Then the encryption route for your data storage options is definitely the correct route to travel.