When it comes to backing up your data and ensuring it remains safe, you have plenty of options at your disposal. Some options are clearly better than others, and when it comes to the debate about external backups vs. internal backups, for many external wins hands down. Here's why you should use an external backup system.

Your external backup system can be done with many different devices. CD's, tape backups, key drives, and online backups are all forms of external backup systems, but tape backups are definitely the most popular external backup especially if your business needs to backup large volumes of data that would otherwise require a lot of storage space. Tapes are relatively small and can be stored offsite with only a small amount of space available.

External backups offer a key element that other backup systems may not, it is off premises, which can be the difference between recovery after a disaster and the end of your business. In a nutshell it can be the difference between survival and failure.

Your tape backup allows you to backup all of your data and then you remove the tape from the tape backup and take the tape off site for storage making it a great option. You get a full backup and you store it safely offsite with little hassle. Off site means that should there be a disaster you will be able to get your company up and running quickly, and when disaster strikes often the company that gets back into business first is the one that succeeds. Research has shown that those that open later are 50% more likely to fail even if they were a successful business prior to the disaster.

When an internal backup is done it is often simply a secondary hard drive that's installed on to the system. There's no question that this is simple and convenient, however, should the system crash your data retrieval may be jeopardized and in the event of a disaster that wipes out your business space you won't have a backup to pickup the pieces and carry on. The same goes for those that store tapes onsite.

An internal backup is usually a secondary hard drive. You can quickly and easily copy your data from your main drive to your internal secondary drive. That means for those small human errors you can quickly retrieve your data.

Tape backups aren't error proof. They certainly offer you some excellent benefits but when it comes down to reliability tape backups are known for being finicky and they must be run on a compatible machine. In fact many times the machine they are recorded on is the only machine they will run on.

Recently another external option has become available. Online backups give you the convenience of being able to schedule backups that are completely automated service or you can create backups on the fly whenever you need whether it's a big problem or a small one. Perhaps you are installing some new software and want a backup just before the install. How convenient!

Now that you know why an external backup system is best and what some of your options are, you're ready to choose.