What's the cheapest way to backup and save files on your PC? I want to back up about 3 gig of files as cheap as possible. Only have a CD burner, and it'll take too long to burn a bunch of those. So, flash drives seem like a good option. Any reason not to use one... or is there a cheaper option?

I say replace your CD drive with a RW DVD drive and use DVDs. There's an initial expense for the drive, but the advantages of more reliable and flexible optical storage make the expense worth it.

You should compress the files with maybe 7zip or even ntbackup. That 3G might be way less to somewhat less. Normally a hard drive per Gig is less. If you only need the 3G a flash is hard to beat right now. What like $7? "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Golly gee guess I need to come by the hardware forums once in awhile. There is storage media and transfer media. Floppy disks and usb sticks are examples of transfer media. They are prone to media failure. Usb is prone to mechanical failure. Tape, DVD, CDR are examples of storage media. They last a long time and are not prone to either media or mechanical failure. A hard drive falls inbetween. It is prone to both media and mechanical failure but the length of time of those failure are between the rates of transfer media and storage media. Should you store backups on transfer media? Only if you don't care about the data long term. Long term being defined as now and into the future for 10 years. Transfer media can fail at any time. I know of an exec that thought he was keeping his docs secure by keeping them on a usb stick he could keep with him. After 2 yrs it died. He almost lost his job due to his own stupidity. Nothing was backed up. As previously recommended DVD's are the way to go. Anything less can't be considered a backup from my point of view.

Just to add to the above. One other advantage of optical media is that you can duplicate the backups very quickly and cheaply for even more security.

Got this as a PM from Point of View. I have condensed it for viewing "From point-o-view 23:54:05 10/21/2008 (reply).Re: hardware, ID:53416, Response:3 I have been building PC rigs for myself and others for well over 12 years, early hard drives were noisey, slow and sometimes unreliable. However, that has all changed now with modern technology comes better engineering with hard drives becoming more and more reliable over the past 3 years especially.! Maxator, Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi Deskstar, and my personal favourite Western Digital,(Raid)(Sata)(Sata2)etc. Please never post a blog saying hard drives are unreliable, (rubbish) and the cds and dvds are better, also you went on the say backup to cds + dvds are more reliable for backups than USB FLASH STICKS & Hard Drives where are you getting all this rubbish from?? I used to burn backups of important files on to high quality dual-L dvds, latter finding out that when I went to load the odd backed up dvd it just would not work, but was fully operational when it was 1st burnt to dvd-dual-L 8 months before.! - regards, POV My reply: Never said drives were unreliable. You need to re-read my post. Do you recall MFM and ESDI drives? I do. Have you been responsible for your corporations terabytes of data for years? I have. Why do you think raided systems exist? It's to make up for drive failure. DVD/Tape can have media failure. Drives can have media AND mechanical failure. POV writes "also you went on the say backup to cds + dvds are more reliable for backups than USB FLASH STICKS & Hard Drives where are you getting all this rubbish from?? " Industry standards POV which you do not appear to be aware of. heres a link, though I disagree concerning usb sticks which if you google failed usb drives and the exec example I gave before prove they are not long term devices. I have had them fail. http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/har... POV I have worked for Symantec and Hyundai. At Hyundai I supported Dec Alpha servers. These are servers the size of refigeratators. I have worked with everything from a 8086 to them. Having supported mom and pop businesses to large corporations, I know exactly what I am talking about. Experience rules! Have a nice day. Guantanamo bay is a National Disgrace! End it NOW!

yeah a stack of media (tape, CD, DVD) can sit on your shelf for decades and be fine, as long as you still have hardware capable of reading it. no professional corporate IT department should think that their data is secure and reliable on flash media. mine sure doesn't, nor do our business partners, vendors, or annual IT auditors. Hard Drives ARE unreliable - they are one of the only pieces left in a PC that has moving parts. these moving parts are susceptible to mechanical failure, while the data is still also vulnerable to the corruption that threatens newer technologies ("transport media" if you want). All that being said, here's a personal experience - I accidentally ran a USB thumb drive through the washing machine. I was still able to read the data from it after it came back out.