Storage has never been cheaper or more plentiful. With that in mind can you afford to have all your clients’ data in one place? We take a look at one solution.
It’s not unusual for even modestly specced machines to come equipped with 500GB of drive space, with that number being increasingly the minimum available size for external solutions. All that space makes it easy to see why we are steered towards having everything in one place, with mirrored drives and cloud backups there as well. You can read more about the many options available to us in Mike Thornton’s article.
It’s easy to forget that around the turn of the century, a reel of 2 inch analogue tape troubling no more than a 4GB stick’s worth of data cost around £100. The high cost of analogue media and their limited capacities steered us towards having everything spread out in different places.
Drives As Tape
With cheap, plentiful modern storage it could make a lot of sense to consider using one drive per client, or even per project. There are many advantages to working this way as discussed by Russ Hughes in his article.
Aside from fire or similar catastrophic events, using a number of smaller drives ensures against total data loss in a worst case scenario, and gives the opportunity for flexible billing and archiving options for clients as well as the simplified approach of physically labelling and organising drives.
Best Of Both? OWC Envoy Express
This external drive takes a neat approach for those looking into the above options. This Thunderbolt 3 external SSD drive can be loaded with different sized memory by the user according to the requirement. It also circumvents a common cause of ‘failure’. Many breakages are down to nothing more than the interface and/or dead cables; OWC lets you replace the latter by anyone armed with a USB-C to USB-C lead and the supplied screwdriver. This makes one less piece of junk for someone else to deal with; let’s hope that more manufacturers of everything will take note. Other features include:
The first bus-powered enclosure that meets stringent Thunderbolt™ power requirements
Uses any NVMe M.2 2280 SSD available today and in the future
Supports up to 1553MB/s real-world performance1
Integrated 10.2-inch Thunderbolt™ 3 cable
Shorter than a ballpoint pen and weighs a mere 3.3 ounces with drive
Runs cool and distraction-free
Black anodized aluminum provides “field-tough” data protection
Includes back of laptop screen slide mount for safe, out-of-the way use
2 Year OWC Limited Warranty