I was on eBay not too long ago and I came across a sale of laptop hard drives for $25. A total of four came with the purchase so I bought the whole lot. It turned out to be the best buy this year. I quickly turned these 6 GB hard disks into backup storage devices for our executives. Here is how.

First I went to CyberGuys. I do not normally jump on the band wagon for too many products but I did find an adapter for these IDE/ATA drives that allowed my execs to use them just like any other USB device. In fact, it was so simple to use that the dumbest of these guys had no issue whatsoever.

I also bought a couple of extra adapters for me in case they lost one of their adapters. But more importantly for me to use as an Admin.

All to often I have need to transfer large files only to see that they were too big for a CD or floppy drive and even to big for a thumb drive. Even though I was on a medium sized network, I did not have the luxury of being able to have drives mapped in a shared capacity due to security concerns.

The real beauty came when I had to take one of these large files and copy it to each server. Since this device was USB it connected right into the port on the face of the each unit and I was done in a matter of a few minutes rather than jump through hoops to get the files to each server.

But the real benefit for me in this secure area was that I could save configuration files for each device straight to the disk as if it were apart of the original hardware.

So this is definitely the best way to go at providing backup for execs and for performing localized backup in an administrator capacity.