Posts Tagged ‘Gigabytes’

Computer Backup for the Freelance Writer

Thursday, July 2nd, 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/computer-backup-for-the-freelance-writer.html

What is Computer Backup?

Computer backup is the storing of copies of your files in a location apart from your hard drive. In this manner, if any damage is caused to the file on your hard drive or your hard drive in general, you will still have a copy of this file to access and use. Computer backup can take many forms, as you can utilize floppy disks, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs or the internet to perform your computer backup.

Computer Backup and the Freelance Writer

As a writer you know how important your documents are. If you lose a document for any reason it can be quite devastating to you and your writing business. Keeping proper computer backups of all of your files can save you much pain, anguish, time and trouble.

By creating copies of all of your important files, you can rest assured that no matter what happens to your computer or the files on your computer you will always have a copy of that important writing project in reserve somewhere, so that you can still access it and work on it. A writer never wants to lose his work, especially to something seemingly as trivial as a computer error.

Forms of Computer Backup

There are many different forms of computer backup. At its core all computer backup is is the storing of files on a location apart from your computer. Traditionally, floppy disks were often used for this purpose, but they are becoming increasingly obsolete. They are being replaced with CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, and one of the newest forms of computer backup: the key drive. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are burnable CDs and DVDs which can hold quite a bit of data: up to 800 and 4700 megabytes, respectively.

A key drive is a removable drive that is very small, the size of a key-chain, and can hold up to 2 gigabytes worth of data. They plug into your computer through a USB connection, and with most newer operating systems do not even require a device driver to utilize. There are also web sites in existence that allow you to backup your files online.

What is the Best Form of Computer Backup for Me?

While floppy disks are becoming increasingly obsolete, they can be a very useful form of backup for the freelance writer. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, while able to hold great amounts of data, are not manipulable once you have written data to the disk. This means that you cannot re-save a file onto one of these disks, and if you are constantly working on a project they will be difficult to work with. While a floppy disk can only hold 1.4 megabytes, you can always work with any file on one and save it back to the disk.

This is also true with the new key drives, and if you are seeking to get ahead of the crowd, you might want to invest in one. Because it acts as essentially a removable drive, it is very easy to work with files that have been saved onto a key drive. If you are a hardworking writer who is constantly working on new projects, the key drive can be a powerful tool for you and your writing business.

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USB Ports – Risks and Safety Precautions

Monday, June 29th, 2009

USB ports might have become the most revolutionary discovery in the industrial computer component industry, but there are some risks that are involved with them. This fashionable accessory along with the computer savvy also attracts various hackers that commit various identification thefts and cyber crimes. This write up contains various tips and steps that can help in limiting the happening of these crimes to a larger extent. The USB are small reusable memory storage devices that can be fitted into the USB port of any computer and can store data up to 20 gigabytes for some models. It is their small size that makes it easier to lose. According to the security services, in New York 12,500 handheld devices, including USB drives are found left behind in the taxis and cab. Read through to know more about the threats as well as precautions that are involved in the USB drives.

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Alternatives to Tape Backup

Tuesday, May 12th, 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/alternatives-to-tape-backup.html

Alternatives to Tape Backup

While tape backup systems have been in use for the past twenty years, the amount of use such systems have had has been increasingly winding down. Reasons for this range from the slow speed of tape backup devices, to the overall reliability of the devices.

While tape backup systems have different capacities ranging from ten megabytes to ten gigabytes and beyond, the fact remains that they are incredibly slow, not exactly the most reliable way to store computer data, and increasingly difficult to locate.

Creating a backup of ten gigabytes to a tape drive can take several hours. Not only that, but tapes can easily be damaged by magnetic waves, such as those found in metal detectors. With such a slow transfer speed and potential data loss problem, don’t you think you should look into tape backup alternatives?

External hard drives are now available with large amounts of backup space, and speeds that traditional tape systems can not compare to.

First off, external hard drives now have wonderful capacities. You can easily gain access to an external drive capable of two hundred gigabytes of storage space. Using an external hard drive for backup purposes is not just safer, but also much, much faster. An external hard drive can easily connect to a system via USB 2.0, Firewire, or even through a network connection. All three of these connection methods will result in file transfers that are many times faster than a traditional tape backup.

Besides external hard drives, you can always look into purchasing backup file servers. With these servers, you can easily add several large hard drives to the backup file server to easily allow many backups to be created.

External hard drives and file servers cost more than tape backup hardware, however they are more reliable and faster.

While purchasing servers and extra hard drives cost a lot more than traditional tape backup systems, they are far more reliable, and as mentioned before literally hundreds of times faster.

While magnetic tape backup systems are still essential for very large corporations, smaller institutes requiring backups of smaller amounts of data are better off to stick with external hard drives or backup file servers.

Home users do not really need tape backup solutions for their data when optical devices such as DVD and CD burners exist.

For home users dealing with large files, tape backup options are not necessary for you. DVD burners offer users an impressive 4.7 gigabytes of space on each blank DVD-R. This is plenty of space for home users, and a great option since you can buy a complete spindle of DVD-R discs for the same price a user would pay for one piece of tape backup media.

While it may seem like the day of tape backup systems have come to pass, the truth is several corporations still rely on tape backup systems for their backup needs. As hard drive technology continues to improve, perhaps some day the price of external hard drives will rival the price of tape backup cartridges.

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