Tools for Backing Up Your Hard Drive - Optical Drives
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CDReWriters and DVD ReWriters: After a little fiddling around, installing a writing package like Nero, burning a few coasters, learning about buffer underruns, and tearing out some hair most users eventually get to grips with their CD or DVD Writers. These make for reasonably good options to move data over. However, being more recent innovations these writeable optical drives are more likely to be in the new machine than the old. That, of course, is as good as a chocolate teapot because the new PC is not where the data needs to be copied from. For the optical drive to be of any use it will need to be temporarily fitted in the older PC untill the data is backed up on disk/s. External optical drives save the bother of changing jumper settings, messing with the BIOS, looking for spare ribbon cables, having to sometimes unplug other IDE devices, or finding that the CD writing software bundled with the new PC doesn’t work in the older version of Windows on the source PC.
Rewriteable disks are more expensive to buy than CD recordables (CDRs) or DVDs but, being reuseable, they pay for themselves over time. In any event using non rewriteable media is a bad idea because throwing CDs or DVDs away risks personal data and files falling into the wrong hands. Once they’ve served their purpose these disks have to be destroyed. That’s easier said than done. They don’t dissolve in water, they don’t burn easily, and breaking a CD results in sharp edges as dangerous as a well maintained cleaver. Using a sharp object to inflict deep scratches on the underside of an optical disk does make it unusable but is not a green solution.
How fast is this method? It depends on the speed of the drive and the speed of the old PC. Typically calculate 150 kbps for each 1x. A drive that writes at 8x will therefore write 1200 kbps. In theory. As the old saying goes: “In theory, there isn't any difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is”. Setting your writing software to do a dummy run first before actually writing will more than double the time you need for a complete backup. Other factors, like programs running in the background, can affect writing speed.
The data storage limits of about 600 MB for a CD and about 4 GB for a DVD would have been considered massive several years ago but are quite paltry now. Even dual layered DVDs offer only about 8 GBs of storage space. An old PC with a lot of media files could have over a 100 GB of files, and tranferring them in 8 GB (or 650 MB) chunks still makes for a messy operation.
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