We are going to touch on a topic now that is, from our point of view, an extremely important one.

Data Backups are an important part of owning and using a computer, whether this be a desktop computer or laptop. The reason we say this is that although all the information you use and view on your computer is stored on the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) itself, it is never safe enough in just residing here. Business's perform a daily routine backup, and with good reason.

Imagine, if you will, that you have now had your computer for 3 years as an example. It has never let you down and has always been a good workhorse. You have alsorts of information on your computer now, ranging from purchased music and films, to important business or legal documents and not forgetting those memorable family pictures youve been taking over the years. However you wake up one tuesday morning to find that your computer will no longer boot up (the process of loading windows or any other operating system) and you see a small message reading along the lines of "Hard Disk Failure". Now you have a slight problem in that it would appear your HDD has failed and is no longer accessible.

What this would mean is that you have lost (not always but still highly likely) any files, pictures, music, films and so on, stored on your computer . So the process of backing up would be to make sure all this information is safe guarded so in the event of anything happening to your computer (be this a virus, the HDD failing, your computer being stolen or anything else).

So how can you back all this information up in order to keep it safe. Well there are a variety of ways these days in which this can be done. And wherever there is a variety in ways you find there is also and aspect of cost associated with each one. To begin then there are 2 categories of backing up, Onsite and Offsite. Onsite, as the name suggests, would be the process of backing up information within the premises, where as Offsite would be backing up information to a location away from where you are. We will first look at a few options available for Onsite back ups.

• CD
  
  If you have a CD rewriter or better then you are able to back up to CD's. Depending on the type of blank CD's you purchased depends on space available, but it is generally safe to say that you are able to store about 700Mb of information to each CD.
  PROs & CONs

• DVD
  
  Just like CD's with DVD's you would need a DVD rewriter or better. The only 2 differences between the CD and DVD options really are space and cost. DVD's are a slight bit more expensive than CD's but the amount of space available is considerably more. Standing at 4.7Gb (4700Mb) the space available is more than 6 fold.
  PROs & CONs

• USB Flash Drive
  
  USB Flash Drives, or storage dongles are small, compact and highly portable. They range from something as small as 128Mb up to about 32Gb. 32Gb would certainly give a lot of people enough space to back information up onto and then still be able to carry it around with you where ever you go as they are typically the size of a disposable lighter.
  PROs & CONs

• External HDD (Hard Disk Drives)
  
  External Hard Drives are one of the more popular methods of increasing your available storage. Some manufacturers do supply software with their product which allows you to setup a pretty much automated backup each time you connect and turn on the external hard drive. There are a high variety of external hard drives available ranging from portable usb ones to larger ones designed to be part of your network.
  PROs & CONs