Which media do you use to back up your data? What is the most useful and efficient? Which type is safest? This page will discuss the considerations you need to think about to make this decision.

Even if you have been meticulous in making a hard drive backup and ensuring that all your data is stored on media other than your computer, none of it will be of any use if the backup media is destroyed along with your computer. This could occur of course in the case of water damage, fire or theft. Because of this people choose to backup online. Other solutions would be to backup on media that is separate to your computer so if the computer is damaged at least the backup media will be safe. To protect against natural disasters or theft it may be an idea to connect your computers to backup media that is located in remote premises or at least in a different room or falling that some distance away from the original computer.

In the end it is only you that can make this decision based on the importance of your data versus the amount of work involved in setting up the hard drive backup procedure.

Essentially you could use any form of media to create your hard drive backup disks. It could be floppy disks, flash drives, CD or DVD, external hard drives or even another computer.

The total size of your hard drive backup files will have a bearing on your decision. In essence, the idea of backup is to copy your data on to a media other than your computer. At the same time it would not be ideal if you needed to keep changing the media as the backup was progressing because there was not enough space on the original backup disk. Ideally, you want to schedule the backup using your backup software and then let the process happen without you thinking about it from day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year. (Although, you should periodically perform a test restore to make sure that the backup is working properly).

Different types of media run at different speeds. Creating a DVD or CD for each hard drive backup could be very time consuming. A fast external hard drive can be very large and also enjoy the benefits of fast speed. If the size of the backup is not overly large speed will not be too much of an issue. If the backup is in the order of hundreds of Gigabytes the backup process could take several hours.