External backup storage - should I go with DVD burner or hard drive?

I too, would go with a hard drive. Faster backups and restores.

Optical media can degrade over time, accelerated by environmental exposure (sunlight, temperature etc). They might be good 10 years from now or maybe not. A hard drive will usually last unless it's physically dropped. The moving parts won't wear out unless you're using it extensively rather than for archiving. But the biggest reason is the worst-case scenario... data can often be retrieved from a failed hard drive (although sometimes at great hassle or expense, but there's a whole industry out there which deals with these problems on the corporate level). When a DVD or CD is bad, it's a coaster.

If you go the DVD route, check your old backups every few years and ideally, transfer them to a current form of storage. How would you like to be the guy today who backed everything up onto ZIP drives 15 years ago?

Make a list of pros for each. Most pros win. LOL. DVD burner is fabulous you can take everything you do off your computer and burn it to disk and keep it safe. However, DVD's aren't free so this will add up over time. On the other hand, an external Hard Drive is also great. Its a lot faster than burning a DVD its just a copy from C: to external HD done! Its also safely there. Just unplug from USB and it sits and waits till you need to add or view or change any data on it then plug it into USB and there you go. You can purchase huge or small sized externals with as much space as you need. Both are portable,(not the dvd burner of course but the actual dvd) to take with you when you leave the house, but easier to carry a little tiny 80 gig external harddrive, That 30 DVD's. I don't usually burn much on DVDs, too annoying to convert movies and such. I do however use my external hard drives for storage. Keeps my system running fast with a lot of available gigs and my files,movies, music and such all safetly and very easily accessible.. Just plug it in. good luck - hope it helps a little..

I would go with the external hard drive.

Why? It'll be faster backing up and restoring data, as you won't be burning to a speed limited medium.

Also, external HDD's tend to hold more than your standard DVD disc. Plus, you won't have to constantly purchase new DVD's if you intend on adding more data. But, that's just my opinion.

~David Ali, TGE News (tgenews.com)

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external 250 gb hard drive is good to go