Backups

[ImLostAgain]

Which is the more advantageous, an external hard drive or a flashdrive, to do a back-up of ones computer?

[VHG]

A flash drive / memory stick is a TERRIBLE thing to do a backup on.

They are not very reliable, and due to their small size can easily be lost or stolen.

An external drive will be better and they are generally very reliable, but even they can crash or be dropped and stop working.

The BEST thing to backup to is a DVD as once it is written it cant be deleted (as long as you use DVD/R and not DVD/RW) though this is limted to about 4Gb or so.

Personally I backup to numerous places. I have 2 external hard drives, plus I copy files to another computer in our house, plus I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) to backup too as well. I also copy very important files to DVD.

Having one backup place is not that great as that can go wrong or get lost or stolen, so backing up to numerous places gets round that problem.

You can never have too many backups.

[ImLostAgain]

Cheers VHG,excellent answer.

[AlBags]

You get NASA to store a copy in their secure underground bunker too VHG? : )

Memory Sticks are fine so long as a good brand like Sandisc or similar .. and they are not in constant use.
Solid State memory wears out, too!

[VHG]

>Memory Sticks are fine

I think they are fine for short term backup, but nobody should use one for any long term backup of important files.

[VHG]

>You get NASA to store a copy in their secure underground bunker too VHG?

I realise your question was a light hearted one, but I have worked in computers for over 30 years (before the days of PCs even !) and a number of times in the past have accidently deleted files (and even whole directories) where I had no back up.

I have also worked with companies who THOUGHT they were taking good backups and when they had to do a restore found their backups were faulty and they could not do a restore. They lost hundreds of files.

So I am now extra cautious and backup everything at least 3 or 4 times in different places. Onve I have done one backup to an external drive it does not take long to copy it to antoehr external drive or to a NAS.

I have over 10 years of digital photos and would hate to lose them all, so I make totally sure that they are all securely backed up.

As we all begin to hold more and more of our lives in digital format I think it is vital, even for home users, to have a number oif different backups "just in case".

If the worst came to the worst, and one of us had a major fire in our house, how much digital information would we lose if all our PCs and external hard drives were unusable.

I think many home users dont do any backup, which is leaving them wide open to losing everything.