In your recent article on , why do you recommend an external drive or Home Server when they both rely upon using a magnetic hard drive as the storage medium? This was the device you panned in the beginning of the article.--Jordan Freedman, West Perth, Washington

I didn't "pan" hard drives, Jordan--I simply pointed out the fact that all drives eventually fail. It's a fact of life.

Nonetheless, hard drives are still your best overall value. CD and DVD are options, but backing up to them is clumsy and slow. Any backup solution that isn't fast and effortless probably will be neglected. And keep in mind that while hard drives fail, so do CDs and DVDs. The big difference is that when your backup drive fails, you know immediately, giving you an opportunity to replace it before it costs you any data. If a DVD in your backup collection fails, you have absolutely no way to know that until you try to retrieve data from it. By then it's probably too late; whatever was on it is gone forever.

There's one other popular backup solution I didn't mention: Online backup services like and back up all your data (including photos) to the cloud for around $50/year. I wouldn't depend upon an online service as my only backup, though. What if the company goes out of business right when you need access to your files? Personally, I rely on Carbonite as a secondary backup in addition to a hard drive-based backup solution in my home office.