Conclusion

Nowadays most businesspeople demand and expect near-immediate access to important business data. At the same tine, lengthy data backup operations are becoming unacceptable for many enterprises. For this reason, short-term archiving systems such as NAS servers (Network Attached Storage) are gaining in popularity. They offer archiving processes that remain transparent to the user.

While MO solutions are geared mainly for long-term storage, with a timeframe of over two hours to fill a 1.3 GB diskette, MO falls far short for quick backup. We would also warn against directly editing large project files on the MO - it took us over 30 seconds to save a 10 MB file in Photoshop.

The rule is thus to select the right systems for the right use. But if you are forced to store customer data on a long-term basis, hardly any other system can match MO's data storage life.

Here, too, we err on the side of skepticism as no one can foretell today whether these types of MO drives will still be around in 15 years - not to mention USB ports.

At the same time, in the final analysis, we also must conclude that the specs for MO drives are not up to many users' expectations. We therefore assume that MO technology will probably vanish from the market in a few years since technological advances in the field of long-term data storage will force ever more frequent changes in archiving systems - even if these are often not really necessary.

Even if magneto-optical solutions are geared mainly to long-term storage, with a timeframe of over two hours to fill a 1.3 GB diskette, it's scarcely possible these days to "quickly" add a backup to your schedule.