Posts Tagged ‘Floppy Disk Drive’

Computer Backup Made Easy

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based tool for online remote backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/computer-backup-made-easy.html

What is Computer Backup?

Computer backup is the storing copies of your files on a medium other than your hard disk. The reason that we make computer backups is to protect against the event that something happens to damage our files so they are no longer usable. If we have backups of our files, then we can restore these files to our computer through our backups.

What is Involved in Computer Backup?

Computer backups can be made in very different formats. The traditional method of backing up computer files was the floppy disk. However, floppy disks are becoming increasingly obsolete. It is already not uncommon to not even see a new computer that includes a floppy disk drive when you go to the computer store, and it is becoming almost impossible to actually get a new computer that includes such a drive. Floppy disks can only hold 1.4 megabytes of data, and there are formats which can hold much more.

CD-Rs are CD-ROMs that you can actually write onto, and hold up to 800 megabytes of storage. You can also use CD-RWs, which can be written onto more than once, unlike a CD-R. DVD burners are also becoming increasingly common, and a typical DVD-R can hold up to 4700 megabytes, or 4.7 gigabytes.

Another new technology which is becoming common for computer backup is the key drive. These are removable drives which are very small, the size of a key chain, and many in fact are designed to operate as key chains. They can hold up to gigabytes worth of data, not as much as a typical DVD-R but still a sizeable amount of data.

You can also make backups of your files online. Online backup involves putting your computer files onto an online server, which you can access from any computer that is connected to the internet. This allows you to not have to bother with physical media such as key drives or CD-ROMs while still backing up your data in a secure location.

What is the Best Form of Computer Backup For Me?

Only you can decide which form of computer backup is best for you. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs both hold a lot of data, but they have the drawback of only being usable once. Even CD-RWs and DVD-RWs, which can be rewritten, are not as manipulable as the old floppy disks. Although you can rewrite the CD or DVD, you must still complete the rewrite all at once. You cannot simply take a file from the CD-RW, modify it then re-save it onto the CD-RW, you must rewrite all of the data on the entire disk. This can be a great drawback to using them for your storage use.

A key drive does not have such limitations. While they are not as large as a DVD-ROM, they are still sizable, and you can work on them just as you would any drive on your computer. This makes them very powerful for your computer backup needs.

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Data Backup to Prepare for Disaster

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based tool for online remote backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/data-backup-to-prepare-for-disaster.html

What is Data Backup?

Data backup involves the saving of your data in two or more locations, so that if something happens to your computer, you still have your data reserved in backup. This allows you to keep your data even if you lose your computer. While you might think that the chances of having a major loss of data on your computer or even having your entire computer crash are very small, disasters happen and it is always best to prepare for the worst, especially when it comes to something as irreplaceable as your files.

Data Backup Options

Data backup can take many forms. After all, any medium on which you save your files apart from your primary computer is considered backup. You might even want to backup your data in more than one location, just in case. If you depend highly upon your computer and upon the files contained therein, you can never be too careful when it comes to protecting your files from disaster.

The most basic method of backing up your data is on a simple floppy disk. However, this method is essentially obsolete, as it is difficult to even by a computer which includes a floppy disk drive these days. With CD-Rs and now DVD-Rs being cheaper than ever, it is possible to store far more data on a single disk than was ever possible with a floppy disk.

You can also backup your files online. There are many companies, such as www.xdrive.com that provide online storage drives which will allow you to store your data without the need for disks or drives or anything of the sort. This can be very beneficial as you know that you will always be able to obtain your data, without having to worry about having the proper CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, or anything of this sort.

What is the Best Data Backup Option for Me?

In order to determine what is the best backup option for you, you will need to know a few things about what you expect from your data backup. For example, what do you already have access to? If you have a CD burner in your computer, for example, then burning CD-Rs with your data can be an excellent and cheap backup method, as it is possible to get CD-Rs for less than $1.00 or even cheaper if you buy in bulk.

If you do not have any such storage devices on your computer, you might want to consider online backup. All you need is an internet connection and you can begin saving all the files you want online. However, if you are working with a dial-up connection, this can be a slow process if you are saving large files, more than simple documents and the like. You might consider purchasing a CD or DVD burner, these cost about 100 dollars or so and can be an excellent investment for your home office.

Or, if the files you want to save are small and you have a floppy drive installed onto your computer, you might just want to continue using backup floppy disks to save your data. It is up to you which is the best backup option to use.

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Backup Device Options for Older Computers

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

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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Backup Options for Every Taste

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup solution — Back2zip. This article is also at http://free-backup.info/backup-options-for-every-taste.html

The Need for Backup

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.

Backup 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 backup. 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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