Writing data on DVDs is cheaper but time consuming. Another advantage is that if one DVD goes bad at least you have the others (if you write on quality ones). External hard drives are more expensive but you store your data faster, no hassle. On the other hand, if the hard disk goes bad you loose a large amount of data in one go. So, data. How do you store it and make backups?
In some businesses, they use DVDs to store data. They say that it's safe to store data in DVDs because it would be harder to be erased. However, I don't use DVDs to store data. I think that they're very inconvenient. Besides, I don't have a DVD writer. I do store data on an external hard drive. It has 1TB of space and most of the things stored there are video files and installers and pictures. An external hard drive is much more convenient than a DVD.
I have lost files and data on my computer when it crashed and what it taught me was to never to save my data in place. So data that I am currently using or that is important to me I back up right away. I use DVDs, flashdrive, an external harddrive, and cloud storage. Most computers these days have at least 500Gb of storage, but I do not save anything important on them at all.
I use both hard drives and dvds. I like having redundancy so in case something fails I still have another. I've been wanting to have cloud backups too but my upload speed is painfully slow and so it would take forever to backup my data to a cloud.
I don't back-up my data with the exception of storing them into flash drives or memory cards. I guess I don't have that much important data since most of what I download are only movies, music, and software and game installers that can easily be recovered by re-downloading them again.
Some bad news about CD's and DVD's. Some businesses are discovering now that they aren't as permanent as once thought. I didn't know this, but I guess almost all of the worlds CD's and DVD's were manufactured by a small number of plants. Anyhow, there was some article I was reading recently that discussed how some cities archives/records are being threatened by decaying CD's and DVD's. And considering how much time and money they spent scanning and converting all their records over to digital years ago, now these discs are starting to go bad too. It mentioned something about the discs discoloring over time and causing the data to be permanently lost from them. Part of it had to do with some bad batches from some of the manufacturers, but since there were so few to begin with, there is a good chance you have many of these bad discs. I try to move my stuff to a fresh hard drive every couple years or so, and I store some stuff in the cloud. What's prohibitive about cloud storage though are the data caps imposed by my ISP. I cannot back up a 1TB drive for example, without getting hit with a bunch of additional fines - the total of which would be more than just buying another external drive.
I use external hard drives. It's more convenient that way and more faster data transfer. I haven't tried saving files on a CD/DVD to be honest. I have a laptop and i don't have a built-in CD Rom in it so really, CD/DVD storage was not for me. I recently just got an external CD/DVD drive but still i haven't tried saving data on a CD. I have a 500GB external drive so i can pretty much store any files in it. Most of what's in it currently are movies and TV shows that I've downloaded though.
I save my data on flash or thumb drives. I really don't like saving data on DVDs. DVDs scratch. I prefer saving data on the cloud over DVDs.
I make it a habit to back them up on every storage device I can. Most of them I store at DVD's for safe keeping, once I saved them in DVD's I just store them somewhere safe. I also have a lot of back up on could storage services like Mediafire just to make sure that I don't lose them eventually or if I want to access them on the go.
I never use DVD's anymore. Apart from their awfully slow read and write speeds they tend to break easy when not store properly or after a certain amount of use.
DVDs can easily be damaged or become unusable, and pen drives are nearly as as bad in my experience, since I've had a few become corrupt or just break completely. I'm currently using Dropbox. There's something reassuring about storing things online. A physical device can break but I don't see the internet disappearing any time soon. Still, it does raise a few doubts about integrity of the data with all those hackers out there, but I don't have anything personal to hide so I don't really have anything to worry about. Does anyone have the same doubts about online storage, or is it unlikely that a hacker would bother with such services?
I've never liked storing my data on DVDs. Its a habit I picked up. Three or so years back I had a job that required a lot of traveling and since I couldn't lug DVDs around I chose to store my data in flash dsiks first and then later when I quit the job, switched to saving the data on an external HDD. I don't have lot's of data to save so if the backup drive gets corrupt or something, I'd still have the data on my PC.
Ever since external hard drives became more popular I just save my files on those instead of discs. Writing on CDs is just too much work. I mostly just save unimportant files on them though and if there are some important files I want to keep safe then I try as much as possible to keep them in multiple places just so I could be sure that if one hard drive goes bad then I'd still have some backups to rely on.
