Gimme Back My Data

James Fohl is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular tool for online backup and recovery — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/backup-device-options-for-older-computers.html

Backup Device Options for Older Computers

Do you have a backup device for your computer system? If you were not aware, a backup device is just a fancy term given to any device installed on your computer system that allows you to make backup copies of your data.

Some common examples of these backup devices are floppy disk drives, CD writers / burners, zip drives, and external hard drives.

Most computers sold today come with a CD writer / burner, or a more advanced DVD burner, which allows users to burn not only DVD-R media, but also CD-R media, since almost all DVD burners are backwards compatible with the CD-R format.

If your computer system is not equipped with a CD or DVD burner, then you should probably begin to shop around for a backup device if you are serious about your computer data.

While a floppy disk drive was considered as the perfect backup device ten years ago, the storage limitations of each disk pretty much make the floppy disk obsolete.

Your computer system may not have a CD burner / writer, but you may think just because you have a floppy disk drive you are safe. While floppy disks were the preferred medium of data storage in the past, the technical limitations of their capacity (1.44 megabytes) is pretty much a joke to modern computer users. Because a floppy disk is only able to hold less than two megabytes of data, no computer user should consider a floppy drive to be a backup device.

Instead users should look at their viable options. If your computer system is more than five years old, a CD burner / writer is kind of a worthless investment because your computer system will be unable to supply the data to the burner quick enough. Thankfully, Iomega continues to manufacture their wide variety of Zip drives that will work effortlessly with these particular systems.

A zip disk is a disk based backup device capable of holding 100, 250, or even 750 megabytes of data.

For those who do not know what a zip drive is, it is basically a disk drive that utilizes disks capable of holding 100, 250, or 750 megabytes of data. Several different versions of the many zip drive models have been released over the past ten years that allow users a variety of options in connecting a zip drive to their system.

An external zip drive is an awesome backup device for older computers because not only is it capable of storing large amounts of data and information, but you can easily use drive and disks on other computer systems.

Iomega Zip drives are excellent choices as a backup device for older computers and their data. The price of the zip disks is however relatively expensive when compared to CD-R media.

The major downside in choosing an Iomega Zip drive as a backup device is the price of the media. While CD-R media are priced at literally pennies per disk, Zip disks are quite expensive, starting at around ten dollars for a single disk. The disks however are very durable, even more so than a 3.5 inch floppy disk, and are guaranteed to last several years.

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