Om Malik has just put together a quick, but interesting list of fun storage facts.

My personal favorite - “Consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year. That is 11 times what they bought in 2003. (NYT).”

People certainly have a lot of new photos, music, and documents that need to be protected. I can only imagine what that number will be in another three years. At the same growth rate we would hit 8.1 billion! My guess is that it will be closer to 15 billion.

Read - 10 Fun Facts About Storage

Three Googlers, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andr´e Barroso, have released a study on disk drives and their failure rates in a large population.

The study surveyed 100,000 drives of different specifications from various manufacturers. They founds that often times drives using only SMART specifications (designed to monitor drive health) did not accurately predict the drive failures.

Even more interesting is that they found drive temperature and activity were less of a factor than previously thought.

The moral of the story - all drives will fail and often times without warning.

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population - (PDF Link)

Since GMail hit the scene many people have suggested that it is a viable option for online file storage.

GMail is a fantastic free service for email. GMail is not GDrive, and was built for a purpose - email.

One also needs to remember that it is still a beta product, and is subject to outages etc.

Don’t forget that you always get what you pay for, using GMail as an online backup solution may be satisfactory for the advanced users, but for those of us who need a reliable, purpose built, secure product there are many better options for meeting your remote backup needs.

Data backup is not something new. The ways for backup have not changed much over time, from the time of the 5 ½ in. floppy the best plan was just to make another copy of the disk. Today, when most people can hardly remember what a floppy disk looks like the same ‘making a copy’ backup method still is all people know how to do. Given that so much of our lives are digital isn’t it about time that a better solution replaces this stone age method?

Even if you remember to backup to another media (CD/DVD/External Drive) there are still too many problems to consider it a reliable backup solution. Here are my top 5:

1. Automatic: It is too easy to forget to backup at the end of the day or week, this is the number one reason that the old method for backup is not a viable one - it requires you to click buttons, insert blank disks, or copy files.
2. Reliability: CDs and DVDs don’t (wont) last forever sometimes they don’t even burn correctly the first time for some strange reason. An external hard drive will eventually fail, especially if your moving it around.
3. Security: Chances are that your data is not encrypted on CD or DVD and can be accessed if it is misplaced.
4. Complexity: The size limit of CDs and DVDs are a constant balancing act in backup, trying to fit your entire Outlook .pst onto one CD or your “My Documents” onto one DVD has always been a challenge.
5. Recovery: The most important part of a backup is the ability to recover, when you have to try restore files from other media you have make sure that they are easily accessible, meaning that taking them offsite is adding safety but cost you time. This also means that multiple backups are made of the same files and having to keep track of the dates can be very confusing.

Take advantage of you high speed broadband connection and make sure that you data is safe and easy to recover.