Free-Backup.info

The Need for Backup

We hear about it every day, someone loses everything on their computer and they have no backup to restore their files from. Whether it be a system crash, a computer virus, physical damage to the computer or some combination, there are many things that can happen to your computer that can cause in loss of your data. Whatever you use the computer for, business, writing, personal affairs, photo storing, there are things on your computer that you just do not want to lose should the worst happen.

While ultimately you can almost always recover your files through data recovery or something of the like, this is a very time-consuming and expensive process and one that you cannot perform yourself unless you are an experienced computer programmer.

Backup provides an easy solution. Having your files in backup apart from your computer allows you to restore your files in minutes should the worst happen to you. Backup allows you to keep your important data in reserve in a place that is separate from your computer so that no matter what happens to your hard disk your files are all in safe backup.

Floppy Disk Backup Becoming Obsolete

It used to be that when you wanted to backup your files, you simply popped a floppy disk into your computer, saved your files then popped the disk out. However, floppy disks are becoming less and less common and will very likely be obsolete in a few years, if not sooner. It is not uncommon to walk into a computer store these days and not see a single computer that contains a floppy disk drive. While it is still possible to use floppies for backup these days, if you are just getting into the backup game it might be wiser to choose another option.

CD-Rs versus CD-RWs for Your Backup

CD-Rs and CD-RWs are becoming commonplace for the use of backup. While a floppy disk will only have 1 and a half megabytes of storage on it, CD-Rs and CD-RWs can have up to 800 megabytes of storage space, hundreds of times that of a floppy disk. With the increase of file size as computers become more advanced and powerful, it is easy to see why floppy disks are becoming obsolete for your backup needs.

CD-Rs and CD-RWs provide essentially the same backup service. They allow you to write data onto a CD-R disk which can then be read on any computer supporting a CD-ROM drive. However, once you have written data onto the disk and finalized it to be read by a CD-ROM drive, that is it, the disk can be used to store nothing else, as the finalizing process means that no more changes can be made to the content of the disk.

This is not true of CD-RWs. CD-RW stands for CD-ReWritable, and these disks allow you to rewrite the CDs. That means that once you have stored data onto the disk, you can then go back and rewrite the disk so that you have a new set of data. However, you cannot individually manipulate files, but must recreate the entire CD when you wish to make new changes to your backup files.

Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup solution -- Back2zip. This article is also at http://free-backup.info/backup-options-for-every-taste.html