Is Burning CDs and DVDs an outdated mode of backing up data?

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   Aya Katzposted 14 years ago

   I notice that more and more new laptops are selling without any kind of CD or DVD burning hardware. There are also no more floppy drives or mini-floppies. How are people backing up their data, besides storage on the hard drive? Is everyone using portable hard drives and flash drives for long term storage of data?
   
   Where do you store your old hubs? Share your secrets!

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      cosetteposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      i don't burn anything anymore. one less thing i have to worry about. it's a lot easier just to put stuff on an external hard drive or flash drives.

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   PhilD41posted 14 years ago

   I am not sure I can share any secrets, but the data I back up long out grew cds or dvds.  So far I really haven't come up with a good idea.  My connection really isn't fast enough for a network solution.  I would prefer this since the data would be off site.  So far, I have settled for an external drive for most of my pictures and video and a network service for documents. 
   
   If you don't need much, dropbox has been great for everything other than pictures and video.  These just take up too much space.
   
   Hope this helps.  I look forward to reading other peoples ideas as well.

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   nicompposted 14 years ago

   Backing up on a mechanical device such as an external hard drive is not a reliable strategy. Mechanical devices tend to fail. Despite the initial expense, tape drives are still an effective alternative for offline backups of relatively large volumes of data.
   
   Unfortunately a traditional DVD only holds about 4 GB, so any decent-sized company would find them problematic; too much swapping.
   
   Online services such as Carbonite are an alternative for home users who don't have huge amounts of data changing every day. These services install a little program on your computer that runs in the background and copies your files to a remote server.

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      Aya Katzposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Nicomp, I have filmed data that I need to back up. I don't want to rely on an external service. Are you saying I need to invest in a tape drive?

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         nicompposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         If you have data that will never change and you simply need an archive, put it on DVDs and store them away. That's assuming the volume of data is not prohibitively large and you won't need to create backups on a daily basis. 
         
         If you have an ongoing need to backup data for a business that is generating data regularly and will need to recover quickly on the event of a catastrophic failure of the primary storage device, then invest in a tape drive. It's not cheap.

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4. 84

   Aya Katzposted 14 years ago

   Phil, thanks for your reply. I'm not familiar with dropbox. Can you tell me what that is?
   
   When did burning CDs become outdated? Only a couple of years ago, that was my usual practice, and now I'm suddenly finding it's hard to do because the new computer makes no allowance for it. But I can still access old data on the CDs I burned.

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   Aya Katzposted 14 years ago

   Nicomp, thanks.

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   relacheposted 14 years ago

   A study done by grad students at Cornell University found that after 5 years, nearly 50% of CDs and DVDs are corrupt and can't be read.  And that's even disks that are stored very carefully.

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   Lisa HWposted 14 years ago

   My PC is only a year old; and just a few days ago I decided to back everything up (again).  The first thing that happens is the PC "tells you" to label a disk and insert it.  When it gets full you're told to insert another one.  Based on the relative "new-ness" of the PC, I don't think using disks would necessarily be seen as outdated.
   
   I use disks (more than one copy) and a flash drive (which happens to hold - like - 1500 of my articles so far (but nothing else).  I've recently realized I need to get an external hard drive.  I'm actually kind of "paranoid" about a lot of my files.  I started putting them on a site that lets you store stuff; and I'd like to print them all out.  I don't have time to do either of those massive projects usually.

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