Data storage options

A buddy asked me to do something on data backup a few weeks back. ( Sorry for getting this up so late, by the way :embarrassed:  )

Here’s a brief overview of it all:

-= Brief Pros/Cons overview-list-thing=-
Ok so first off you have drives. ( Microdrives, External Hard disks, etc. )
Their write speed is very fast, they wear slowly, and as of now they have the smallest ‘gb per dollar’ ratio on the market. You can get a lot of memory in a small amount of space for very cheap.
Some external hard drives (  ex western digital passports ) are made for portability, but they are mostly embeded into computers.
Of course, with hard drives come hard drive faliure horror stories and mechanical parts (spinning disk, moving head)
If anything gets too close to magnets all of their data is erased and totally unrecoverable. If you can’t protect it from that, this might not be a good choice.

Another option is a Solid State drive ( Flash memory: CompactFlash cards, SD cards, microSD cards, etc. )
They have no physically moving parts and are not affected at all by magnets. Most are also very portable.
You can fiind small amounts of flash memory practically anywhere, but higher capacities are harder to find.
However, write speeds are sometimes slow, and they wear pretty quickly if written and rewritten a lot. They also come in tons of differnet shapes and sizes, so you’ll need the appropriate card reader before you can do anything with it. Build quality is pretty important with flash memory, so be sure to buy a reputable brand. Amazon reviews are usually pretty good with this, but it also seems to be a favorite topic for flame reviewers. :p

Optical discs are yet another (admittedly mediocre) possiblility
Most Optical disks can only be written once, although there is such thing as a rewriteable CD/DVD.  They are disposable, dirt cheap, and they wear out after about 30 years.
CDs are generally not a good choice for long term data backup for this reason.
CD-ROMs usually have ~700-800 mb capacity, while DVDs can hold 4 or 5gb of error protected data.

Aside from your nomal backups, you could also upload to some online storage service (Hint: See post below ) . That way, you can just let them manage the drives for you to use as a last resort. And if it breaks down on you, you can just blame the service for your data loss.

Alternatively you could just buy one of each of the storage types and make several copies of the same file on each device.  It might take a while, but at least it won’t keep you up worrying in the middle of the night.