DVD Backups

Many of my friends and customers have flocked to writable DVDs as their backup media of choice. And for good reason: DVD burners have gotten cheap, they're reasonably fast, and the discs are plentiful and inexpensive. Since the discs are part of the DVD standard, people aren't tied to any one vendor (who might go away) if they need to restore their data a few years from now. DVDs are portable and easy to carry somewhere else for an off-site backup.

However, DVDs definitely have their down-sides. One is that they only store about four gigabytes of data. Even with compression, one can only hope to store six to eight gigabytes of data on a single disc. With modern drives holding in excess of 100 gigs, that means that it may take 25 discs to completely back-up a system. Another down-side to DVDs is that they are fragile. Scratching a movie disc might mean a few seconds of jumpy video; scratching a backup DVD might damage an important file or ruin the whole backup. Additionally, one has to take care in how they write on a DVD. Using a regular felt tip pen will ruin a DVD over time, as chemicals in the ink eat through the disc; special dry-erase markers are necessary to write on CDs or DVDs. Labels that people paste onto discs will come off over time, potentially destroying both the disc and the drive that the disc has been inserted into.

For users that don't have huge amounts of data, backing up the entire system to DVD certainly provides an effective and inexpensive way to back-up their computer. For those with more data, backing up a subset of their computer (for instance, the "Backup your Work" option with ShadowBack) to DVD is also effective. We suggest that users take good care of their discs, leave them in their jewel cases during storage, and only write on them with dry-erase pens specifically made for writing on CDs and DVDs.