Best Backup Solutions - Choosing the Right Type For Home Users

The best backup solutions for home users these days include online backup services, burning your data to CD/DVD/tape or synchronizing data to an external drive. This article looks at which computer backup options work best based on pricing, data protection and backup volumes.

Pricing

Burning CDs of your data has long been a cheap and economical approach thanks to plummeting costs of media. Purchasing an external hard disk drive (HDD) is a close second place option, especially based on the volume of data you can store. Finally, online backup services have a recurring cost (usually a monthly subscription) which can increase based on how much data you wish to store.

Data Protection

This is a tougher decision to call. An online service will clone the backup data you upload to several servers in order to limit the risk of data loss if one server is damaged. However, many users will be concerned about transmitting personal files over the web.

Using CDs/DVDs/HDD to store your data puts the responsibility of securing this data with the owner. If the original data & backups are stolen at the same time then your data is gone for good.

Backup Volumes

The best backup solutions that accommodate large and expanding data volumes are the CD/HDD approaches. As the backup volumes increase you can simply burn more CD copies. The HDD approach is constrained by its disk size, however, most modern drives can store many hundreds of gigabytes of information so can accommodate most PC users.

By comparison, using an online service is usually limited to a few gigabytes (or you pay dearly for storing larger amounts) so this is really only useful for partial backups.

Choosing the best backup solution ultimately comes down to what your highest priority is. For many, this will be security as the goal of maintaining backups is to safeguard them from loss/theft.

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