Data Backup FAQ's

USB drive/Memory stick/Flash disk

Since Windows 98, Microsoft has begun support for these devices on their platforms, including Win98, WinNT4, WinXP, Win2000. USB drives work much like floppies once they are plugged-in. In fact you can treat them much like any other drive on your computer once they have been setup on your PC.

USB drives come in capacities of 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB & 512 MB. There are much higher capacities but for our purposes the abovementioned are sufficient. As a general rule, these drives normally cost $1/MB i.e. a 32MB drive will cost around $32, a 64MB drive will cost around $64, etc. In comparison to floppies, which can hold only 1.44MB of data, USB drives can hold whatever capacity the label says.

Generally, USB drives are used for the transportation of documents/data from machine to machine, not necessarily for permanent storage. For example, you are going on leave & wish to take some of your workingt documents with you so you can continue to work on them on your PC at home, a USB drive would be ideal for this, similarly if you want to take some documents to be printed on a computer with access to printer, a USB drive will do the job.

CD-R/CD-RW disk

As a general rule, this type of media would be used for more permanent storage of data. Although the acronyms may be confusing, their uses are pretty handy:

• CD-R = CD Recordable
• CR-RW = CD Re-Writeable

Please remember that NOT all CD drives can write CDs, nor can all CD's be written to i.e. just becoz you have a CD-R disk does not mean that your CD drive can write to it OR just because you have a CD Writer drive does not mean that you can write to all CDs. Please see the website for clarification on these points.

Now most, if not all, CD-R/RW disks come in 700MB capacities. Although this can be a confusing issue, I will clarify:

Disk media:

• CD-R: is like an empty glass, as you fill it with data, the glass begins to fill up until it can take no more (normally at around the 700MB mark).
• CD-RW: works almost exactly as the CD-R, but when the glass is full, you can always empty it and start filling the glass again.

Disk drives:

• CD drive: will read CDs ONLY.
• CD-R drive: will read CDs, and write to both CD-R & CD-RW disks, but will not empty the "glass"/CD once the disk is full.
• CD-RW drive: will read CDs, and write to both CD-R & CD-RW disk, & will empty the "glass"/CD-RW once the disk is full.