External hard drive

The external hard drive is the option that gives you the largest capacity. It is essentially a small box that holds a standard hard drive and plugs into your pc via a USB cable. The benefits of using an external hard drive are twofold. In the first place external hard drives can hold enormous amounts of data. One terabyte drives are in common use these days and are around a hundred dollars. One terabyte is equivalent to 1024 gigabytes. To put that amount of storage space into perspective consider that the entire contents of the Library of Congress can be stored on thirteen terabytes. In the second place the external hard drive will give you the lowest cost per gigabyte of any of the solutions for home backup.

The downsides of the external hard drive is that it is a hard drive and will one day crash taking all of your data with it. Any form of data backup can fail and you need to keep a copy of the data on the internal hard drive of your pc as well as on the backup. This is most true of the external hard drive, though, because all hard drives will eventually die. Another downside is that it is the physically least resilient of any of your backup options. Due to the nature of  hard drives you can't drop an external hard drive, get it wet or subject it to extreme conditions.

Use an external hard drive if you want to backup a very large amount of data cheaply and don't expect to be bouncing around too much.

USB flash drives

The USB flash drive is a small stick that is comprised of an enclosed piece of memory and a USB connector. You plug the stick into your pc and back up your data to it in much the same way you would to an external hard drive. Like external hard drives they are easy to use. Unlike external hard drives USB flash drives offer less storage space for your dollar but are more resilient. A 32 gigabyte flash drive will cost between thirty and forty dollars. Compare that with the 1024 gigabytes of storage space available on most one hundred dollar external hard drives and you see a real difference in cost per gigabyte.

Why bother with a flash drive, then? They are a lot harder to break. A flash drive has no moving parts and thus doesn't have a lot that can go wrong with it. You can drop one from five feet onto a carpeted floor and you will have no problems. Don't try that with an external hard drive. USB flash drives don't require power supplies. It is also small. So small that you can chuck one in a pocket or purse and not even know you put it there. Take it out when you need it and pug it directly into a PC's USB port.

Use a USB flash drive if you need an ultraportable way of backing up a small to medium sized amount of information.

            DVD-R

            The recordable DVD-R is a disc that can hold up to 4.7 Gb of information. Most computers that are a few years old or newer will have a DVD burner on them and discs can be bought in bulk for between forty to fifty cents a piece. The upside is that if you want to give someone data like a set of baby pictures you can burn them onto a DVD-R and then just give that DVD-R away. Apart from the ability to mail this medium, give this medium away or toss it when you no longer need it there is only one other benefit. If you take digital pictures or video it is possible to back your pics and video up to a DVD-R in such a way that you can play the DVD-R back on any standard DVD-R player to be viewed on a TV.  This is a nice feature and most DVD burner software can allow you to do this. The cons of using a DVD-R for backup: you can't rewrite a recordable DVD-R unless you use DVD-R rewriteable discs and those discs take a long time to write data to.  What you end up with if you use this method regularly is a pile of DVD-Rs filled with data you may no longer need. In other words landfill fodder.

            Use a DVD-R if you need to back up a small amount of data that you may also want to give to someone else. Or if you want to make a DVD-R movie from video or pics you have shot.

            CD-R

            The CD-R has the smallest storage capacity of all of our options and costs about thirty cents a piece if bought in bulk. The standard CD-R contains 700 megabytes. This is less than a seventh of the capacity of the DVD-R. The CD-R has all of the properties of the DVD-R with two notable exceptions. It is too small to transfer home movies to and maintain any kind of decent video quality and you can use a CD-R to make music discs. This is currently the CD-R's main strength. A Cd-R will play in almost any standard dvd or cd player, not to mention game system or blu-ray player and you can put up to eighty minutes of music on one. Use Itunes and you can make a music mix tailored to your new year's eve party or your upcoming birthday bash.

            Use a CD-R to backup data if you want to back up a tiny bit of information that you can then give away or if you want to make a music cd.

Well there you have it. Choose the backup method or methods that are right or you. If you need me to help you learn how to use any of these or you need any questions answered regarding backing up your data just call me at

901-830-4362.