Times have changed. Drastically. Specifically regarding technology and storing of data files, a lot of changes has happened.

Gone are they days when punch cards backups were used as a reference point. Next came the use of Magnetic tapes. Magnetic tapes were far better than punch card backups because these can store as many as ten thousand punch cards in a roll. These magnetic tapes performed better than the punch cards. The use of magnetic tapes was a success so much so that magnetic tapes were used from the 60s until the middle of 80s.

Hard disks as backups have been around since the 1956 when IBM 305, the first hard drive was introduced by IBM. What came next was when IBM introduced the IBM PC/XT with a hard disk drive that was a standard part of personal computers. It was not just IBM that developed hard drives because Hitachi was able to ship drives with a storage of 1GB back in 1982. There were already hard drives back in the 50s and 60s but these were large and very expensive, not like the hard drives of today that can be had for $300 with several hundreds of GB storage space.

Floppy disks were used back in 1969 when it was first introduced. 80kb of data can be stored in this read-only 8-inch disk. A rewritable version was developed using the same size but with a greater storage capability: 256kb of data. The trend continued with the production of these floppy disks in smaller sizes like the 3-inch disc that can store as much as 250MB of data. With the use of these disks, transferring data from one computer to another became an easy task.

These floppy discs, though handy, still fall short with the growing needs of its users who needed more capacity for their backup needs. CD-Recordable (CD-R) and CD-Rewritable (CD-RW) were introduced. Sony and Philips invented these compact discs. Following these were CD-Rom drives installed in computers which made CDs popular for backup use. 4GB DVDs were also introduced later on.

To date, the use of portable USB flash drives serve as one of the popular devices to use for backup files. These blu-laser discs that carries the Sony Blu-ray brand can be used as data backup since it has a capacity to have between 23GB and 54GB. Toshiba’s HD-DVD can also be used for data back-up.

It is also possible to have backup files stored through remote backup storage. How? Through the Internet or a network. Having files stored this way is also a security measure just in case backup files have any problems, at least, another set of files are still available.

Now people are ready should there be any new changes with remote backup storage to satisfy their needs to have reliable backup storage for their files. Can you still keep up with the change?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Anything Tech, Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.