Once upon a time (back about twenty years ago), if you wanted to back up your brand-new ten megabyte hard drive you went out and bought yourself a box of floppy disks.  If you were really lucky you owned a brand-new 5.25? floppy drive capable of using disks that could hold up to 1.2 megabytes of data.

Back then, backing up a hard drive mainly involved buying a box of floppies and zipping data across disks.  As years passed, however, the size of hard drives continued rising?and the size of floppies didn?t.  The widespread move to 3.5? floppy drives in the early 90s increased storage capacity to 1.44 Meg, but by then hard drive capacity in even the average computer was well past 200 Meg.  A number of manufacturers introduced products designed to bridge the gap between floppies and hard drives.  Some, like Iomega?s Zip drive, had limited popularity, others, like the ?floptical? drives of the early 90s were expensive failures.  Capacities either tended to be too low to promote adoption over the floppy, or the drives and disks were too costly.

The introduction of the CD burner temporarily gave the edge back to removable media.  Although CD burners were slow, a typical CD could hold 600 Meg, which made backing up even multi-gig hard drives quite possible.  By the late 1990s, however, CD burners were already losing backup value.  Backing up even a 10 gigabyte hard drive took 17 CD?s and over two hours of burning time on a modest 8x burner.  Moreover, because CD?s had to be swapped by hand, it wasn?t an operation that could be easily automated.

The introduction of DVD burners hasn?t changed much.  While DVD?s hold up to eight times as much as CD-ROM?s (up to 4.8 GB), hard drive storage has increased by entire orders of magnitude.  DVD-R?s are also significantly more expensive than CD-R?s?picking up 25 of them to back up a hard drive probably isn?t the most cost-effective measure available.  Then, of course, there?s also the time needed to create the backup copy itself, the risk of damage, and the need for backups to be handled manually. 

In the meantime, the cost of hard drives has dramatically dropped.  With 120 gig drives now costing as little as $80, this puts the effective cost per gigabyte as low as sixty-six cents.  Although this is higher than the cost-per-gigabyte of a DVD-R, hard drives sustain much higher transfer rates than the slower burners and backups from drive to drive can be left unattended.

The most cost and time-effective means of backing up a hard drive for the home and small business user, therefore, may well be another hard drive.    Enter the Mirra Personal Server, a device designed to offer continuous backups, remote access, and customized file sharing across both a local network and the Internet

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• Internal, External Design (1 of 5)
• The Pitch: What Mirra Claims (2 of 5)
• Installation, Setup, Features (3 of 5)
• Remote Access (4 of 5)
• Conclusion (5 of 5)