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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.
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 . 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.
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