One of the most important thing you can do in the office is backup your files. Millions of working hours are spent trying to recover lost data in offices that forgot to keep backing up their data. There are a few different devices you can use to backup data, here is a brief explanation of them;
Hard Disks/External Hard Drives
The capacity/price ratio of hard disk has been rapidly improving for many years. This is making it more competitive with magnetic tape as a bulk storage medium. The main advantages of hard disk storage are low access times, availability, capacity and ease of use. External disks can be connected via local interfaces like SCSI, USB or FireWire, or via longer distance technologies like Ethernet, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel.
Optical Disk
A recordable CD can be used as a backup device. One advantage of CDs is that they can be restored on any machine with a CD-ROM drive. In addition, recordable CD's are relatively cheap. Another common format is recordable DVD. Many optical disk formats are WORM type, which makes them useful for archival purposes since the data can't be changed. Other rewritable formats can also be utilized such as CDRW or DVD-RAM. The newer HD-DVDs and BluRay Disks dramatically increase the amount of data possible on a single optical storage disk, though, as yet, the hardware may be cost prohibitive for many people.
Flash Drives
Also known as flash memory, thumb drives, USB flash drives, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, Secure Digital cards, etc., these devices are relatively costly for their low capacity, but offer excellent portability and ease-of-use.
Magnetic Tape
Magnetic tape has long been the most commonly used medium for bulk data storage, backup, archiving, and interchange. Tape has typically had an order of magnitude better capacity/price ratio when compared to hard disk, but recently the ratios for tape and hard disk have become a lot closer. There are myriad formats, many of which are proprietary or specific to certain markets like mainframes or a particular brand of personal computer. Tape is a sequential access medium, so even though access times may be poor, the rate of continuously writing or reading data can actually be very fast. Some new tape drives are even faster than modern hard disks.
Remote Backup Service
As broadband internet access becomes more widespread, remote backup services are gaining in popularity. Backing up via the internet to a remote location can protect against some worst-case scenarios such as fire, flood, earthquake or nuclear strike which would destroy any backups in the immediate vicinity along with everything else. A drawback to a remote backup service is that an internet connection is usually substantially slower than the speed of local data storage devices, so this can be a problem for people with large amounts of data. It also has the risk associated with putting control of personal or sensitive data in the hands of a third party.