Your Backup Options

By Author: Steve Mc Karmik
Total Articles: 45
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Backing up your data is an extremely important habit to get into, both for a business and for an individual. For businesses it could save losing thousands of pounds of data. While that might sound rather extreme, imagine if an editor of a magazine lost all their files before the magazine went to print; or if a market research company lost all of the research they'd conducted for a month before sending it to the company; or if any business supplying a service lost their only client database. Such an incident could prove catastrophic and even cause the demise of the company. For an individual meanwhile, it could be more a psychological blow - losing all their work on a novel, losing years' worth of photos, or losing all their school or university work. In this sense the sentimental aspect can be akin to having a house burn down (though slightly less devastating).

It's nothing less than crucial then that all important information be backed up, and there are certainly lots of options when deciding how to do this with the one you select depending on your exact purposes, budget and the amount of data you have to store.

The ...
... first and most obvious options are memory cards. These provide flash memory that's non-volatile and highly affordable and portable. SanDisk offer a broad range of options, with the SanDisk extreme range going up to 32gb (the highest capacity SDHC cards currently available). The SanDisk SD and SanDisk Ultra also offer slightly cheaper and smaller alternatives to the SanDisk extreme range meaning that there's something for everyone.

These memory cards offer many advantages to other forms of back up. Being barely the size of a coin they are incredibly portable and easy to transport (they'll fit into wallets or shirt pockets). This means that one person can carry several at once and take hundreds of gigabytes of storage with them wherever they go (this is helped further by the relatively small price). For a company it would be possible to give every employee their own memory card to habitually back up their work, while for an individual one single card would be enough to back up pictures and documents with the option for an additional memory card for music.

Further advantages come from the compatibility of the memory card which enables it to be used by just about any computer (those that don't have an SD slot can use a memory card reader to make them work via USB), but also most other electronic devices. This includes phones, PDAs, mp3 players, cameras and a whole host of other gadgets meaning that you can transfer images, music and other files with no need for wires. This also means that your PDA and mp3 player can be backed up as well as your main computer.

As non-volatile memory you can also rest assured that you won't lose your files on SD over time. With all these advantages, memory cards offer a great solution when it comes to backing up data and can help any individual or business to look after their data.

Author recommends SanDisk Ultra and other SanDisk SD for your digital camera.