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5 Ways To Backup Your Data...

Article By: Jason Kohrs

Article Source: articlealley.com

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The data on your hard drive is the most critical item inside your computer, and the only item which can not be replaced. It may be an unwanted hassle and expense to replace a defective memory module, monitor, or processor, but there is no replacing data once lost.

In addition to the possibility of a simple hard drive failure, the threat of internet borne worms and viruses has become an increasing risk to data loss or corruption. Although you may not be able to provide absolute protection to your hard drive, there are various ways that you can ensure that the data on your hard drive is protected. Five methods of backing up your data are summarized below…
 

1. USB Flash Drives

Although I am not recommending that flash drives be used for the actual data storage, they are a convenient means of transferring data from one computer to another. Important files can be quickly loaded onto a device such as the MINIDISK-512-DGRY-CS USB 2.0 Flash Drive, and transported to another computer for safe keeping. Installation and operation is extremely simple, and other than perhaps having to install a software driver, the use of a USB flash drive is a matter of having an available USB port on your computer. Just about every computer produced over the last several years has USB ports included, with more modern systems supporting the USB 2.0 standard. USB 2.0 allows for data transfer rates of up to 480 MB/s, which is a tremendous improvement over the original USB speed limit of 12 MB/s, and allows a user to fill their drives with data in a relatively short period of time.

Although the storage capacity of flash drives has increased greatly over the last year or so, users are still limited to common sizes of 512MB and 1GB. Mass storage is obviously not an option, but even 512MB may be enough to backup your “My Documents” folder, several albums of MP3s, or other important files to be stored elsewhere.

2. CD and DVD Writers/Re-Writers

The falling prices of CD and DVD writers/re-writers have made them a staple of just about every modern computer. These devices can typically be found installed in a computer case, but external devices supporting USB 2.0 or Firewire are available for greater flexibility and ease of installation.

A combination drive, such as the NU Technology DBW-521, will provide the user a high speed CD reader/writer, as well as a DVD reader, for under $40. The extremely low price of the drive (and the blank media) makes for an inexpensive means of creating data backups, and the re-writable media increases the convenience by allowing the same disc to be erased and reused many times. The main limitation of using a CD writer for data backups is that the discs are generally limited to a capacity of 700MB per disc. Not nearly enough for a full backup, but adequate for archiving key files.

 

The popularity of DVD writers/re-writers has surged thanks to dropping prices, and they are pushing the stand alone CD burner towards extinction. DVD media affords the user far more storage capacity than a CD, and DVD burners can generally burn CDs as wells as DVDs. The recent availability of double layer DVD burners, such as the Sony DW-D22A-DO-N, represents a large boost in the capacity of writable DVDs, taking the previous limit of 4.7GB per disc and nearly doubling it to 8.5GB.

With proper storage, CD/DVD media can provide long term storage that can not be jeopardized by hardware failure. The data on a CD or DVD can easily be read by just about any computer, making it a good choice for archiving files that aren’t excessively large.

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