Stick To Fast Rewritable Formats For Your Backups

In computer terms a CD-R, DVD-R or DVD+R is a WORM format, meaning “Write Once Read Many”. In other words, you can write to the disc and continue to do so until it’s filled up, but cannot erase or modify any files once they are written.

A CD-R/W or DVD-R/W DVD+R/W can be written to but also can have files modified or erased. But the problem is that they’re agonizingly slow by design in order to ensure stable file writes and rewrites.

Hard drives and Flash based media are cheap enough these days where you can stop using optical media entirely.

I will say before continuing that yes, nothing beats optical media as far as price is concerned as it is the cheapest way to store data. But the tradeoff is a media format that’s easy to scratch and physically degrades much faster than a hard drive or USB stick would.

So how much does it cost now and how convenient is it?

The media with the largest capacity that’s the easiest to use is a hard drive made by Western Digital called the MyPassport. If you search NewEgg for this term, you’ll see them show up. The single largest advantage is that it requires no power supply. Just plug in via USB and it powers itself by that alone. It is definitely not the cheapest media out there, but the convenience more than makes up for it.

Other external hard drives do require a power supply and can be bulky, but are admittedly much cheaper.

External hard drive enclosures are cheap (some under $10 new), however you have to check to see the maximum hard drive size it will support. The cheap ones will only support a 160GB drive.

Decent external enclosures (around $40 new) will support a maximum hard drive size of 750GB.

If you factor in the cost of a very good external enclosure and the cost of a 750GB drive, the cost at the time of this writing is about $110 combined.

The cheapest and arguably most reliable is the USB stick.

At the time of this writing, the best bang for the buck is the 16GB stick; they can be purchased for under $30 new.

Some real world examples of how much space you’d actually need

The only time anybody needs gobs and gobs of backup space is if they’re performing full hard drive backups, backups of super-high resolution images, high resolution audio or video. Those things take up more space than anything else.

However with something as small as a single 16GB USB stick, you could:

• Backup thousands of photos
• Backup hundreds of thousands of documents
• Backup 5 years (or more) worth of email

…all on that single stick.

Even if you already have some big hard drives backing up your huge files, consider getting a stick for the smaller stuff. It’s more convenient, fast, can be transported easily and is more reliable than optical media.

While optical is cheap, Flash and traditional hard drives are the better option.