Hard Drive Virtues
You may feel anxiety about the cost of external hard drives—especially since, as I explained earlier in Keeping Multiple Backups, you should have at least two, and perhaps three of them. They may seem extravagant in a way that DVD-Rs, say, do not. So let me sing the praises of hard drives for a moment, while explaining why they're not only the best solution, they're economical too:
Speed: The first thing hard drives have going for them is speed. You may have hundreds of gigabytes of data on your computer's internal hard disk, but copying such large amounts of data can be extraordinarily time-consuming under the best of circumstances. Even fast optical drives and tape drives transfer data at a fraction of the speed of a slow hard ...
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