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.

What's the Best Way to Back Up My Data?

This is quite a common question. It seems almost everyone knows they should back up the information on their computer, but few know how to and even fewer actually do. Flash drives? CDs? Cloud? The tech world doesn't make it easy to pick a way to back up your information, but there are a few ideas to keep in mind when picking a backup solution.

1. Cost
2. Ease of Use
3. Security

Finding the perfect balance of these three things for you will give you the backup plan you desire, but to start things off, what does "backing up" mean and why is it important? Backing up simply means to make a copy of your computer's information onto a source outside of your computer. Why? What happens if your computer dies? Stolen, hard drive failure, struck by lightning, etc. Having a backup means not loosing all your important files and documents in case of such an untimely end of your computer.

I tell people to first consider the ease of use of their backup plan. How much time do you want to dedicate to this? Do you want something that you just set up once and it automatically runs after that or do you prefer to have a more hands-on approach? There are a plethora of automatic backup programs out there for people like me who know they won't remember to sit down and manually run a backup program on a regular basis. Ask your technology advisor, friends or family for recommendations.

Secondly, cost. Where are you going to put your backup? Is it going to go on an external hard drive or will you be burning CDs? In this example, an external hard drive will cost more up front, but will last you significantly longer with no additional costs. CDs on the other hand will have a smaller start-up cost, but you'll need to buy more as time goes on. Cost also ties into ease of use as backup programs will range from free (like Apple's Time Machine) to expensive (like a corporate backup program) and everywhere in between.

Lastly, security means how safe is your data once it's backed up? Here's where I get on my soap-box: Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy! If it's worth putting in one place, it's worth putting in another place. For example, let's say you have a laptop and you backup your photos on an external hard drive. What happens though, if your house catches on fire and your computer and hard drive are gone? That's the allure of online backup programs like Carbonite. These programs back up your computer's information to a remote location (yes, the "Cloud") so even in a worse case scenario, your data is safe and you don't have to worry about loosing it all.

Practical Tip of the Day:

Need a place to store information and a place to back it up too? External hard drives can be formatted in such a way as to make them act as is they are really two distinct devices. This means you can use half of it for storage (things you need to be able to access regularly), and the other half for backup (your "in case of emergency break glass" backup plan). More on the difference between storage and backup next time.

What Does KB, MB and GB Mean?

In Tuesday's article on What Size Flash Drive You Need, we discussed the different sizes a digital file could be and what their average is. Some files were measured in KB (kilobytes) while others were in MB (megabytes) and still otheres were in GB (gigabtes). This digital capacity measuring system can seem intimidating at first, but once the basics are understood, it's quite simple.

If you're already familiar with the metric system, you have a head start as that is where the prefixes for these measurements comes from. For example, kilometer and kilobyte. The metric system does things in multiples of 100's, but for technology, you'll see it used in multiples of 1,000. Brain hurt yet? Here's a simple breakdown:

• Kilobyte- 1,000 bytes
• Megabyte- 1,000 kilobytes
• Gigabyte- 1,000 megabytes

There are measurements above and below the three measurements given there, but these three will be the ones you primarily see in computers and technology today. Think you've got it? Here's where things get a bit messy; These measurements are really metric and aren't really multiples of 1,000. If you're familiar with how computers work on a basic level and use binary (click here if you aren't) you know you know that they count by 8's, this is called a byte, and therefor instead of a kilobyte being 1,000 bytes, it's actually 1,024 bytes. Will you need to know this? Not unless you want to show off, but it's still good to know and there are nerds out there that will correct you on it.

Practical Tip of the Day:
The 1000 vs 1024 difference doesn't make much an impact on a small scale, but as you start storing more and more data, the impact becomes more and more pronounced. Check out this helpful chart from Wikipedia for a quick reference.

What Size Flash Drive Should I Get?

The other day a friend of mine was mentioning that they needed to go to the store and buy a flash drive, but when they were there earlier in the week they were overwhelmed by the vast differences in style and capacity flash drives come in nowadays. (Click here if you don't know what a flash drive is.) While style is completely personal, there are a few tips that can make picking a capacity (or more commonly called "size") of flash drive easier.

The first thing to consider is what you'll be putting on the drive. Are you using it to backup photos? Transferring songs between your computers? Or are you storing important documents and PDFs on it? Different files tend to be larger or smaller than others. For example, a good average size for a word document (1-3 pages of text) is about 20-30 KB (kilobytes). Audio (music, spoken word, etc) is about 1 MB (megabyte) per minute, and photos can vary wildly depending on resolution and file type but tend to be 1 MB or less per photo. (If you don't understand "megabyte" or "kilobyte" check back on Thursday when I'll be covering that topic.)

That being said, a 4 GB flash drive will hold roughly 4,000 photos, 4,000 minutes of audio, or more word documents than any one person would probably ever have for personal use at any one time. When stated like that, most people usually lean more towards getting a smaller (again, we're talking about capacity, not physical size) flash drive. Consider though if you're storing a home video. If you have a nice HD camera, it can take up to- or sometimes surpass- 2 GB (gigabytes) per hour of video. This is because videos contain both an audio track and thousands of pictures to make up the video.

Practical Tip of the Day:
If you're planning on using a flash drive to back up your files, I recommend reconsidering and getting an external hard drive instead. Far too often I've seen clients that have a drawer filled with flash drives that have photos on them, but because of this method, they have to search through the drawer looking for the correct drive if they need it and that's if they had the forethought to label the drives as they filled them. An external hard drive gives you one place to find all of them, making it much easier to locate your files if you need to recover them.

What Are Flash Drives?

Flash drives, thumb drives, jump drives. All these different names mean the same thing! It used to be, long long ago (all the way back in the 80's, and yes, I'm being sarcastic) that if you needed to share information with another personal computer you could put it on a floppy disk. Then you could put it on a different kind of floppy disk; These ones weren't really floppy anymore, but they were very similar. Fast forward a little bit and you get to compact disks- CDs for short. Then came DVDs, and then finally, the flash drive.

These are usually about an inch to an inch and a half (about the size of a thumb, hence being called "thumb drives" sometimes). You stick the smaller metal end into the USB port on your computer. If you don't know if your computer has this port or where it is, look at all the holes in the machine, usually on the back, but sometimes on the side or front as well, and look for something that looks similar. It is extremely likely that you have a USB port on your computer as they've been standard for quite some time now.

Once you plug it into your computer, you'll be able to find it using the same technique you use to find files on your computer, and you'll be able to manipulate it in the same ways as well. Flash drives are like mini-hard drives in that they allow you to store files on them, manipulate files on them, and remove files from them as well. They are very handy when you need to share files that are too large to send in other means like email or cloud storage. For example, my husband recorded a video that was too large to send in either of those methods so he put it on the flash drive, brought it to his brother, plugged it into his computer, and then copied it over. The entire process (minus driving time of course) took less than two minutes.

Practical Tip of the Day:
When you go shopping for a flash drive, you'll find yourself overwhelmed with options. There are cheap ones, expensive ones, fancy and plain ones, large ones, small ones, etc. The most important factor in picking out a flash drive is how much storage it offers. If you noticed in the picture I placed above, the flash drive there says it has four gigs. (A "gig" is a unit of measure for computer data.) It is important to think about how much space you'll need before heading to a store. Will you be storing large video files or just transferring small word processing documents? Once you've picked the size, that will help narrow down your choices. Everything else is secondary. They make ones that connect to your keychain, ones that look like movie characters, ones that are as small as your thumb nail, and the list goes on and on!

What is Cloud Storage?

It seems everything nowadays offers cloud storage, a place you can keep things up in... the cloud? What is "the cloud", what kind of things go into it, and how does it work? Cloud storage has been around for a long time, but it's seen a surge in popularity in recent years. (Note: This is not a full, technical explanation. This blog, and the articles within, serve to give a "normal person's" understanding of technical topics.)

When people talk about "the cloud" they are generally speaking about servers held by a particular company. A server is a physical computer that serves only one purpose- the kind we'll be discussing are storage servers, and their job is to hold, transfer, and move data and information around. When you put something up in "the cloud" you're sending the file over the Internet, and onto one of these servers. Once it's there, you can access it from any computer you want using the same website you used to put it up. That's it! Cloud storage in a nutshell.

Sometimes cloud storage is known as a "drop box", which I find is a lot less vague. Cloud storage is a lot like your own personal locker on the Internet, where you can access it wherever and whenever you'd like. How big your "locker" is depends on what the company offering it to you has allotted. Sometimes they're small, just big enough for a picture of two, or sometimes they're larger, allowing you to share whole movies with your friends and family.

Practical Tip of the Day:
Cloud storage can be used as a good way to back up your most important files from a "meteor falling on my house" sort of emergency, but may not be a good primary source of backup, especially if you ware using a cloud storage company that also offers file transfers (as many do). A good, recent example of this is a company called MegaUpload. It was taken offline by the government for being a place people would share copyrighted material like movies and music. Unfortunately, there were also lots of people who were using it for legitimate purposes like sharing important business files or storing person files like backups, photos, etc. At this point in time, they are still unable to access any of their files.