Table of Contents
External Hard drive
Several different manufacturers now offer external hard drives with capacities measured in hundreds of gigabytes. They connect by USB or Firewire cables to your computer. Many models have connections for both firewire and USB (though you use only one at a time). These drives offer extremely high capacity at higher speeds than any other medium. The cost per byte is cheaper than any other medium. For image backups or full backups, this is really your only reasonable choice. For selective backups, this choice is perhaps overkill.
Models change often enough that specific references to recommended models quickly become obsolete. Right now, some examples can be found by companies like Maxtor, IOMega, Western Digital, Seagate and others. They are available on the Internet or at local computer and office supply stores.
As you choose whether you want USB or Firewire, realize that all Windows XP computers have USB, but few have Firewire. Most Apple OS X computers have both USB and Firewire. If you already use all the available ports on your computer, computer and office supply stores also carry USB and Firewire hubs that convert one port on your computer into four or more ports on the hub.
iPod and other .mp3 players
Most hard-drive-based .mp3 players, like the Apple iPod or the Creative Zen include the option of partitioning part of their hard drives as data drives. This reduces your capacity to hold music on the devices, but as newer models come with increased capacity, there is enough for most people to store both their music and their selective backups on the same device.
Writable DVD and CD
CDs are falling out of favor as a backup medium. Writing to them is slow and while they are inexpensive per disc, they hold less than a single GB. Given that the files that people want backed up commonly include music files and photographs (large files in large numbers), one CD doesn't hold all that much anymore. Keeping track of which files are on which disc can be confusing, and the discs are easily scratched, rendering the contents inaccessible. Then there's the issue of where you store your CDs...
DVDs hold about 4.7GB and double layer DVDs that double that capacity are beginning to become available. Still, this is not an ideal backup medium because writing to the discs is remarkably slow, the discs are easily damaged, and the cost per byte is not entirely competitive with the external hard drives.
If other media are not available and you want to copy some files to have a backup to hold you over until you can back up to one of the other media mentioned here, writable CDs and DVDs are better than nothing.
USB FLASH drives
Comparable to a CD in capacity, but much faster and more robust than a CD, the most common medium these days for moving files from one computer to another (besides through a network) is the USB FLASH drive. It is actually a persistent form of RAM, so there are no moving parts. These started out at around 64MB capacity, though at the time of this writing, the most common size is 512MB or 1GB. Expect capacity to continue to rise and cost per byte to continue to fall. These drives are not cheap per byte, but they are extremely convenient with a useful capacity for either backing up a few important files, or moving files from one computer to another.
U.Va. Home Directory Service
ITC offers 1GB of secure storage on a server accessible through the Internet. You can access it from any computer on grounds via the U.Va. Home Directory Service Logon Application (with versions available for Windows or Macintosh) or from off grounds if you use UVa-Anywhere. You can access the same files via Secure FTP (with versions available for Windows or Macintosh) or the Web.
Files stored here are automatically backed up for you every hour for two weeks, to protect you against human error (deleting or overwriting a file that you later need). Those hard drives are backed up to tape each night to protect you against hardware failures. If our server's hard drive fails, you'll lose only files saved to U.Va. Home Directory Service more recently than the previous night's tape backup.
Find more details under RELATED LINKS in the right margin of this Web page.
A lot of students email files to themselves as attachments as a crude form of backing up the file. While perhaps clever, this is not the best use of your available resources. The email servers are busy with the load of handling email for something like 40,000 accounts here at the University. One of ITC's yearly budget challenges is finding the money to upgrade our e-mail servers to keep up with the perpetually growing load on the servers.
People like yourself are very unhappy when the Central Mail Service (CMS) servers go down. Sending large files to yourself via email is one way you contribute toward bringing down the servers. You have a lot of other available means to back up your files. Please don't email files to yourself.
Everything else
There are many different storage media for files. I believe I have already described most of the ones worthy of serious consideration. Most other media are either inconvenient, unreliable or lack sufficient capacity to be useful as backup media.
Diskettes are obsolete. Many new computers no longer have diskette drives. Diskettes have very little storage capacity and they do not age gracefully. Those fond of using diskettes will likely discover that their old diskettes fail to work and cannot be reformatted.
IOMega's Zip, Jazz, Peerless and other cleverly named drives are generally obsolete, since the manufacturer often stops manufacturing the removable media for these drives. Castlewood's Orb drive is obsolete. Tape drives are not good, practical choices for individuals to back up their hard drives, though network administrators with specialized backup needs still find them useful and inexpensive per byte of storage.
There are a number of Internet based storage options, like Apple's .MAC account or the on-line storage offered by most Internet Service Providers. You may investigate these as you wish.