For reasons of laziness, I will be using the acronym HDD when I am referring to the Hard Disk Drive or the Disk Drive throughout the following blog.
The answer to the first two questions is: any file that you would be crushed if you lost. Lets say you converted your wedding VHS tape to DVD. The tapes degrade after a period of time, around 7 years, your young children scratch the heck out of your only DVD copy, and in order to free up some space for a video game, your teenager deletes all your video files. After you send your kids off to military school, now what do you do? Well since you have a back-up copy of the video saved, you just make a new DVD.
Another example is, you spent hundreds of dollars downloading songs off of I-Tunes and never quite get around to burning them to a CD. You get a virus that wipes your HDD out. Without a back-up, Bye Bye music & Bye Bye money.
The answer to questions 3 & 4 are as follows:
- External HDD.
- $80 & up, depending on brand & capacity.
An external hard drive is probably the best at backing up files. I say the best because you can back-up your files and then store the hard drive somewhere away from the computer. This is for worst case scenarios. Lightning fries your computer. Your computer is dead, but those vacation photos of your trip to Aunt Freda & Uncle Irv's summer cottage are safe and sound. Now all you have to do is call me to build you a new computer (shameless advertisement) and load the photos onto your brand new computer. Plus now the files are portable. Instead of spending money to print all the photos out and buy a scrapbook, just take the drive with you when you go to the family reunion, plug it into a laptop and in the words of Emril Lagasse, BAM instant slidshow. Also, most external hard drives today come with some sort of back-up software pre-installed that makes it relatively easy to back-up your files.
- Extra Internal HDD.
- $80 & up, depending on brand & capacity.
Except for the fact that they are fastened inside your tower/case and not very easily accessible, they work the same as the above mentioned external HDD. An advantage to these is the fact that they are already tied into your system thus making the back-up process a little easier. Another advantage is storage. Now you don't have to worry about trying to find a safe, dry, out of the way location to store it. In my lightning scenario though, the internal HDD doesn't help too much because it is going to get fried along with your computer.
- CD or DVD.
- $ .15 & up per disk, 10 to 100 disk spools.
These are portable and cheap forms of storage, but do not have a whole lot of storage capacity. They are better suited for things like: making picture CDs to give to a family member, putting your downloaded music onto for listening to in the car, or storing updates on for commonly used software. They would probably be just fine for the novice computer user that just wants to do the above mentioned activities.
- Thumbdrive / Flashdrive.
- $10 & up, depending on brand & capacity.
Similar to CDs & DVDs, they are limited in there capacities, but not for long. Like CDs & DVDs they have specific uses and backing up systems is not one of them, yet. They are great for transporting files between the office and home. Or in my case, to store troubleshooting software and fixes on to take to jobs.
- Online storage services.
- Usually 1 or 2 gigabytes (GB) free and anything above that is either a per GB fee or fixed block fees. An example of fixed block is $5.00 per month for 10 GB and so on.
Online storage is kind of what it suggests, you store all your back-ups to an Internet storage host. In essence you are renting storage space from someone else. So now some person you don't know with a company you found on the Internet has control of all the photos, music, files, etc... that you back-up to their site. Your stuff is "safe & secure," just waiting for the day you need to download it to replace lost originals or for whatever reason you need it. The problem is, it's all on some server in India or somewhere else you can't gain access to with out a computer & an Internet connection. Another drawback is the fact that some hosts limit the size of the files you can upload to 25 megabytes (MB). This is about 20 minutes of music or a folder with about 100 photos in it.
The best strategy is to back-up your back-ups. For example: save your music files & photos to an external HDD and a CD. Then if you don't need the originals on your computer, delete them and free up some HDD space on your system. Backing up your files is a smart thing to do for the off chance that some precious photo, song, or important file gets deleted or corrupted, you don't have to sweat it, you have a back-up.
So there it is, everything you wanted to know about backing up data, but were afraid to ask. Or, something you don't care about, but unfortunately for you, I needed to fill some space so I wrote about it.