Moving on from floppy discs underneath the kitchen sink as a backup solution.
I have recently bought a refurbushed laptop with has an SD card reader on it. Was wondering what people thought of SD cards for backing things up. I think I might adopt a belt and braces approach and backup to both (as well as a the cloud).
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Never buy black socks from a normal shop. They shaft you every time.
I've had problems with removable media losing data in the past. (USB device rather than an SD card).
As a matter of course I generally back up to multiple sources.
Best backups for dependancy to my mind are external hard drives.
I've got two maxtor external 500gb drives (Bill & Ben) but for the amount of data I store on them 40gb drives would have been fine and you can pick those up for peanuts.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
For me the biggest problem with SD cards is that they are physically so small that I tend to misplace them. I had a tiny 8gb USB drive and did the same with that. I use SugarSync for my backups. It backs up my office machine to the cloud but at the same time to a mirror on my laptop.
Back up to the cloud, i use skydrive, people of a certain inclination go down the apple route and use icloud. Either way, easier, safer, and accessable from anywhere.
Nick
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Nick
Nick Craggs FMAAT ACA AAT Distance Learning Manager
total dropbox fan myself - have all customer info and some personal and still haven't had to pay a penny Always have your stuff when you need it with @Dropbox. Sign up for free! http://db.tt/oZ42Scv
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Donna Curling - Complete Book-Keeping Ltd (CBKLtd) - 07939 101900
SD Cards and other flash memory devices have a limited life - but in practice, it'll be so long you probably won't notice it. It's actually a number of write cycles, and it's a high number; something like 100,000; so unless you're constantly re-using the card, it should be fine - especially since most implement something called wear levelling, whereby if you frequently wipe and write new data, it tries to avoid using the same sectors too often.
If your backups are generally kept for quite some time, so that you're only infrequently wiping the data, a combination of that and the wear levelling should - theoretically - mean the SD cards will outlive you.
Your biggest problem will be not losing them - and labelling them, come to think of it; such small things don't lend themselves to being easily labelled, and therefore identifying without searching through all your cards.
And the other thing to remember is to always - ALWAYS - dismount the card before ejecting it. Forget to do that after writing a new backup to it, and you'll say goodbye to that backup and any others stored on the card.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
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