The traditional method of backing up data is storing them on floppy diskettes. Here we need more than one diskette because they can only hold about 1.5 megabytes of data. However, this is only the minimum standard available since you have various backup media including CDs or even DVDs.
When you hear talk about backing up on CDs or DVD, you will also hear a new term called burning. No this is not exactly what you are thinking. Burning is another word for “copy†or “writeâ€, a term you may already know. However, burning describes how you write data onto a diskette, or you could also correctly say, etching information using a laser on a recordable diskette.
For sure, it is different from the traditional copying of files. There you would copy files from one disk onto the surface of another disk, but it performs the same role of making a carbon copy of your data.
Just as the traditional copy method allows you to choose which folders or files you wish to back up, rewritable DVDs and CD disks have the same provision. And you can also incrementally increase your backups as you add new text, audio, and video files. That is, you can save time by backing up only information you entered today, while keeping previous days’ backups intact.
Having said that, you should know that you need rewritable DVD or CD diskettes to allow backups after the first one. You can know these diskettes by looking for the terms, DVD/RW and CD/RW respectively. These are different from the other class of diskettes: DVD/R or CD/R. The latter diskettes allow you to only make a permanent copy of your data, so once you have written onto them, you cannot reuse them for another project.
Using DVDs or CDs add more storage capacity for your backups.