What's the Difference Between Storage and Backup?

Frequently, when asked for recommendations on backup plans, the question of storage vs. backup comes up. These two words are similar, and can mean different things in different context, but in this instance, we'll look at what it means to put your information (like photos or music) in storage instead of backing them up.

If you're like me or a lot of people nowadays, you probably have a large photo collection. So large in fact that you're probably running out of storage space on your computer. Instead of going out and getting a new computer entirely, what more people are doing is getting an external hard drive and storing all of their photos on there instead of on the computer. This can be done in a number of different ways that I won't be going into now, but almost inevitably, the person asks why they would want to store their photos off their computer and have a backup.

The reason is that when you're simply storing your photos, you can still access them easily. Think of this like when they're on your computer. You can still open them, edit them, share them, etc. If you have them backed up though- especially with a backup program- they're often times not in a format [read: version] that you can easily open and make changes to. Think of this as having your real photo albums in the attic instead of in your closet. It's much easier to get something out of the closet and use it than it is to get it out of the attic.

Practical Tip of the Day:
An increasing trend is for people to get an external hard drive (like the one pictured above) and partition it. This means that they change the hard drive so instead of acting like one large space, it acts like two smaller spaces. This allows people to store files on one side and backup their files on another. Now, keep in mind, if you use this method you want to backup the files stored on the storage side another way. Why? If that external hard drive fails, you don't want to loose where the files were stored and backed up.