DESPITE all the talk of the 'paperless' office, the amount of data that a company stores increases on a yearly basis. With more and more information stored in digital formats, the risk of data loss is increasing.

A recent study showed that most companies have not implemented a disaster procedure should the worst happen. With the price of hard drives coming down, the cost of storing crucial data is becoming cheaper and cheaper. If you do not have a backup solution or are thinking of upgrading your current system then the following options might help you come to a decision.

1 Western Digital My Book Pro Edition 500GB USB2.0/Firewire 800

For those who want a cheap way of backing up a large amount of data then the Western Digital MyBook is ideal. With 500GB of data, it is enough to store all important documents and data for a business and is designed to be portable.

Price: 199.95 from Komplett. ie Review (www. xbitlabs. com/articles/storage/display/wdmybookpro. html):
"I recommend the WDG1T5000N for every user whose computer supports FireWire 800. This will give you a highest practical speed. If you are going to connect your external HDD via other interfaces, you may as well choose any other product"

2 Buffalo LinkStation Pro network shared storage A more powerful solution for backups, this device can be attached to your computer network so data can be moved across to it from any computer and user in the company.

With 750GB of space, years of emails and word documents can all be stored on this drive.

Price: 679.32 from Elara. ie Review (www. pocket-lint. co. uk/reviews/review. phtml/2008/3032/buffalo-linkstation-pro-network-storage. phtml):

"A lot of storage device for your money, feature packed, small and quiet this makes an ideal alternative to the bulky and expensive TeraStation units for home users and small businesses looking for network attached storage to protect and share their data."

3 Dell PowerVault 110T

Looking a bit long in the tooth and out of place with the newer kids on the block, the Power Vault is a workhorse built to last and to work hard. Its shortage of features is made up for by the fact that it can store and retrieve mass amounts of data quite quickly.

Price: 1510 from Dell. ie Review (www. itweek. co. uk/networkitweek/hardware/2158150/gigabytesmoney):

"Dell's PowerVault 110T is an Ultrium 3 drive that packs up to 400GB of native, or 800GB of compressed, data on a single compact cartridge that costs around �50. This equates to about 12.5p or 6.25p per gigabyte, far less than any disk-based storage equivalent. . . The PowerVault 110T copied the contents of the hard disk, 24.5GB of data, in one hour and 25 minutes, and copied a single 6.35GB directory of multimedia files in 15 minutes and 16 seconds."

4 PICK OF THE BUNCH: Iomega StorCenter Wireless Network Storage Appliance

A less expensive offering than the dell but using hard drives instead of tape for backing up, this storage device (1TB 7200rpm external network hard drive gigabit ethernet) is more start-of-the-art and even includes an option to connect to it wireless and upload or download stored media. For those who like practicality mixed with the most modern technology then this is for you.

Price: 907.16 from Elara. ie Review (www. laptopmag. com/Review/Iomega-StorCenter-Storage1TB. htm):

"Anyone can throw four 250GB parallel ATA Seagate Barracuda drives into a modded cube PC chassis, integrate some ports, and call it a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance."

5 ONLINE BACKUPS For those who have a good internet connection and are not as paranoid about storing their data offsite . . . and not even in the same country . . . then online backup solutions are worth a look. Some advantages of online storage are that there are no equipment costs, there is no need to buy additional tapes and the data is automatically stored offsite so there is no need to have tapes delivered to another location for storage.

OmniDrive OmniDrive. com offers online backup for all your files and includes additional feature like being able to make some files public and writable from multiple locations.

Price: from $40 a year for 10GB storage to $199 a year for 50GB storage.

Review (www. netscape. com/viewstory/2007/01/23/review-ofomnidrive-online-storage-with-web-20-frills/):

"Omnidrive is a good service but pricing is one factor where they will have to improve. Many good and trusted competitors are giving very cheap options as well and thus it will be hard time for omnidrive to find a very good user base. Only their features will be able to keep them ahead of their competitors and I think they have scored good on features."