Internal hard drives: Hard drives are relatively inexpensive and efficient but they are prone to viruses or software corruption due to other software running on the system. You can’t store it in a location separate from your computer. You have to install it in another computer in case you have problems with the computer and you need to recover the backed up data.

External hard drives: An external hard drive can easily be attached to your computer using a USB port. External hard drives can be stored in a location that’s separate from your computer, which can help protect your backup. You need to connect it with your computer every time a data backup is done and is usually slower than internal hard drives.

Writeable CDs or DVDs: CDs and DVDs are relatively inexpensive and are easy to find in stores. Practically, all recent computers have CD/DVD burners installed. You can store the CDs or DVDs in a location that’s separate from your computer. Depending on how much data you have, it might take several CDs or DVDs to hold your backup while CDs or DVDs can become corrupted over time.

Custom Search

USB flash drives: USB flash drives are relatively inexpensive and can hold a fair amount of data. You can store a flash drive in a location that’s separate from your computer. It could fill up quickly as typical sizes are still small.

Network locations: If you have two or more computers connected together, a shared folder or drive on one computer can be a convenient place to save your backup. Ideally, the network share is protected with a username and a password while backup time depend on the network devices’ transfer speeds.

For the most flexibility, my recommendation is to save your backup to an external hard drive :)

Last 3 posts by George

• Backup considerations for Microsoft SharePoint - July 26th, 2010
• What is Cloud Computing? - July 19th, 2010
• Is Cloud computing getting safer? - July 13th, 2010