X- Drives

An X drive is online storage. This is disk space that is available from anywhere on the Internet. The main advantages of this are that because the information isn’t held on your local computer it can be accessed anywhere so you could do some work at work and save it to the X drive and retrieve it from home and continue working on it. Another advantage is that if your computer is infected by a virus then you stand a large chancing of loosing you work, were as if your computer got a virus and all you work was stored on a remote X-Drive it doesn’t really matter and you won’t loose any work.

There are many uses for X drives in computing today these include work storage, Backups and file sharing there are also many more uses but these are the one I will be explaining.

Imagine you work in an office however you also work from home, how do you transfer your information around? You can carry it around on a memory key or similar devices. Or another option is to save your work to an X drive remote storage. This has the advantage of you not having to carry anything around and also nothing to forget. Other advantages are that if your work is held on a server the server will be backed up everyday so if you accidentally delete a piece of work it is retrievable, there is also the pro that you stand less chance of loosing you work due to malicious programs such as Trojans and Viruses. Your computer may have a virus protection suite on it however it is going to be nothing compared to anti-virus technology that is installed on servers, which is updated daily or in some cases more than once a day. So you will have less chance of loosing data this way.

It is very important to backup your computer to help prevent data loss. This can be done in different way. It can be backed up and store on the local computers hard drive or It can be backed up and stored removable media, or the final option backed up and stored on a remote storage system. Out of these three options the second and the third are the better ones. This is because if you backup all of your files and system onto the same computer then if the hard drive in the computer ceases to work then all of you original work and the backup copy will be lost. So it is better if you backup your system on to a remote computer or onto removable storage device. Out of the two acceptable methods the last (storing on a remote computer) is the best because if your backup is held on a server and the server is also backed up then you have extra protection. X drive are remote storage and if your X drive is in the form of a remote file server then you have the additional advantage of that being backed up for extra security.

Many people today are into file sharing. This is extremely popular because it allows you to share resource with friends and family, one way in which this is used is to share photos. You can but photos that you have taken on to an X drive and anyone you give access to it can view the pictures or other files. However there are people who abuse X drives and share files which do not belong to them to begin with. This is a popular thing at the moment, it is commonly called peer to peer sharing this is were a person who has file shares it on there computer or places it on a remote storage site were other people can access it. This action is actually illegal as it is classed as piracy.

Many advantages have been pointed out in the above passage. There are also some disadvantages that need to be mentioned such as the cost of these services and also the legality of some of the information that people can store on them. It is possible to store file that do not belong to you on there, so you could store a set-up for a program that doesn’t belong to you. This is one thing that is highly illegal, if someone originally purchased the set-up file from the developing company then publish it with out paying the fees to the company it is illegal as it is the same as copying a CD or DVD.