"Mayayana" wrote in message
news
"NY" wrote

| I used to back up to CD-RW, when all my emails, documents etc would fit
onto
| one 650 MB disc (those were the days!). But it was painfully slow. Once
| portable self-powered hard discs became available, I changed over to
backing
| up to them.
|

I use DVDs. It takes maybe 5 minutes, which I
don't need to supervise. I keep everything I need
backed up regularly on a single data partition and
copy that partition to DVD. I don't see why anyone
would need more than 4 GB for *routine* backup.
I do have big stuff backed up to old hard disks and
USB sticks, but for routine it's easier and more stable
to use DVDs.

I've had more CD/DVD discs go bad (unreadable) on me than I have hard discs.

CDs and DVDs are fine for full backups, but if you do incremental backups of
just the files that you have changed since last backup, you gradually eat up
disc space which is only recoverable if you wipe the disc clean and start
again.

I back up all my photos. I currently have 770 GB of them. At present they
are backed up to a spare 1 TB drive that became free when I bought a 4 TB
drive internal drive (for photos and TV recordings) and used it to replace
the 1 TB drive.

Likewise I have about 1.7 TB of TV recordings which are backed up to a 2 TB
USB drive.

I find that optical discs are fine for easy transport to give to someone
else and can be played in a music CD player or a TV DVD player (though many
of those will now accept hard discs as an alternative, subject to the big
restriction that the drive must be formatted as FAT rather than NTFS). But
they are a pain if you want to back up more than will fit on a disc, or for
gradual incremental backups.


In the past I used to use 100 MB and 250 MB Zip discs which had the
advantage over optical that you could delete files and regain the space, but
the disadvantage that they were lower capacity. I kept the Zip drive until I
was sure that I didn't have anything on Zip disc that I didn't also have
elsewhere. Likewise for floppies: I made sure that all my floppies were
transferred to other storage before I got rid of the last PC with a floppy
drive.