How easily could you or your company recover from a fatal hard disk crash? Without an up-to-date backup, a hard drive failure could be a traumatic - or even catastrophic - experience. Whether what you lose is only those recent photos you haven’t had time to print out or the software applications and data files your business depends on to operate, the inconvenience is very real and, in many cases, can be very costly.

As the cost of hard drives has come down, drive size (storage capacity) has risen dramatically and the size and quantity of our data files and software applications have grown exponentially. Where does one store a copy of 40, 80 or even 100 GB of data? The simple answer is: on another hard drive. Data Protection Solutions by Arco specializes in designing products that simplify and automate hard disk backup and restore functions using a second hard drive as the backup media.

Of course, you can simply copy individual files from one drive to another through your operating system but manual backup can be a tedious and time consuming chore--and one we all too often tend to forget. Also, if your drive becomes damaged or fails completely, file backups are only part of what you will need to rebuild or replace it. What you want to have if you experience a drive failure is a drive to drive image backup that contains everything necessary to restore or recreate your drive, particularly if you need to restore a boot drive.

Both our EzBackup drive backup software (and our USB backup drives) as well as our EzRAID disk mirroring products perform disk to disk, or drive to drive, backup. Both will create an exact copy of your entire drive. However, they operate very differently.

The EzBackup software creates an initial image copy of your drive. Then it performs automatic file backups according to which files you have told it to backup and when you indicated backups should be run. Your drive and data backups are always as up to date as the time of your last backup (which you didn't have to remember to do.)

The EzRAID products are RAID 1 hardware devices that allow a second drive to operate invisibly alongside and in tandem with your existing drive. The EzRAID products create a complete copy of your drive, called a mirror. (RAID 1 is called disk mirroring.) Hardware mirroring is different from drive to drive backup (and even from software mirroring) in that it does not copy your data from one drive to another. Once the drives have been mirrored and are identical, every time you save data to your drive, the information is automatically sent from the computer to both drives concurrently. So you always have an exact and up-to-the-minute copy of your drive. If one drive fails, the second takes over automatically and your computer stays up and running.

Both the EzBackup and EzRAID products utilize drive to drive backup, or disk to disk, technology to ensure you'll always have a spare copy of your drive, including your operating system, your software applications and your data files. So, in the event of a disaster, you'll have everything you need to keep your computer running or to quickly and easily restore your drive and get your computer working again.