September 2003

Using DVD Technology for your Backup

Ever had your system crash on you with the blue screen of death or one morning you turn on your computer and all the data has been erased? How about a virus that compromised your system in the middle of the day? Believe me, you do not want to be in that situation ever and what’s worse is you have absolutely no data to restore from. This article will attempt to outline the technology of DVDs and how you can use it to backup your valuable data.

DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc and it is a high capacity disc for video, multimedia, games, audio applications and now data storage. As you probably already know, data is useless if it cannot be retrieved and restored easily. Most backups are confined to the spanning of data across sets of discs due to storage restrictions. What if one of those discs that belong to the backup set got damaged? How about backing up your data on to a single DVD and forget spanning across several discs? Now, you probably understand DVDs as a movie disc that you can rent at the local video store but have you ever thought about backing up your data onto these DVD discs? Well, there are six recordable versions of DVD-ROM devices and it’s important to know what the differences are and what each of the different formats is used for. The table below will give you an idea of what they are and specify their functionality and storage capacities.

Similar to CD-R, DVD–R and DVD+R can record data only once. Like CD-RW, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD+RW can be recorded many times. The advantage of using a DVD as supposed to a CD is it can store a lot more data. The storage capacity of a CD-R and CD-RW is 700 Megabytes whereas DVD-R and DVD-RW holds 4.7 Gigabytes of data, that is almost 7X the difference between the two medias. When compared to a DVD-RAM, that difference is doubled to 14X that of a normal CD-R or CD-RW. This is kind of the same battle between Betamax and VHS back in the day when users were experiencing a dilemma with the technology being implemented. The important thing to note when purchasing DVD media is to ensure that the DVD rewritable drive and DVD software support the format being used. Some DVD burners will allow you to only playback on their own proprietary DVD media. If you attempt to try and playback on another DVD burner, it will give you an incompatibility error. It is important before you purchase your DVD burner to ensure that you do not purchase a proprietary DVD playback media.

DVD-RAM is the recommended method of choice for backing up data for storage purposes simply because it can be double-sided and has the capacity to store as much as 9.8 GB. There are several companies that manufacture these DVD-RAM devices. Heavy weight companies like Panasonic, Toshiba, Hitachi and Compaq are all currently manufacturing and selling DVD-RAM drives. However, DVD-R and DVD+R burners are also readily available to accomplish the same task at half the data storage capacity. The difference between DVD-RAM and DVD-RW media is that DVD-RAM uses random access storage similar to a floppy disk whereas DVD-RW uses limited sequential access storage. The main advantage of random access storage is that it lasts a lot longer than it’s sequential counterpart making it perfectly suited for use and re-use by consumers.

Before you start buying DVD burners, consider how much data you really have to backup. If you have data in the range of over a Gigabyte, I would strongly recommend using DVD technology. Also, keep in mind that DVD technology is fairly new and like all new technology will end up costing more. The price of a CD-RW burner can range anywhere from $100 to $200 depending on the speed and the brand name you buy. Comparatively, DVD burners fall typically in the range of $500 – $600. As you can see, the price difference is staggering and something that you might want to carefully consider when deciding on what your backup solutions will be. Keep in mind that DVD technology is fairly new and not quite to operating speeds as some of its competitive counterpart. CD-RW burners typically operate at a maximum writing speed of 52X whereas the highest writing speed DVD burner only operates at a top speed of 4X. What that means is that if you wish to burn a 4.7 GB DVD-R disc, it will take you typically 15 minutes at top speed.

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