What's the best way to back up word documents?

I have just bought a new laptop but like a lot of new product it doesn't have an optical CD drive. What's the best way to back up Word documents? Should I buy an external cd drive or hard disk? What do you recommend?

 

To just back up some word documents you could just get a 16GB USB stick. That should do you for a while. If you need more space get an external USB3 drive.

Optical media has been very dead for a while now.

 

Another easy way is to email the documents to yourself and then copy them to your hard drive folders when you are back home or in the office.

 

I have hundreds of recordable CD-R and DVD-R disks that I made from 10-20 years back. When I randomly select a few, more than 66% have unrecoverable errors. They are garbage, even the best brands have major disc rot. The safest long term backup storage is 3.5" desktop PC hard drives. 2.5" laptop hard drives are a little more delicate, that's what's in most external USB Hard drives. The safest external hard drive would be a larger sized 3.5" enclosure. Preferably one with eSATA if your computer has that port, then USB 3.0. I've also had a lot of flash drives go bad. I was literally just trying to recover a corrupt 32GB lexar micro SD from my son's phone last night. Spent hours with different apps, failed miserably.

 

I know they are unreliable but I personally miss CDs. I used to like burning mixes of music and stuff.

More seriously, I will be recording music with Cubase LE and want to know if I can burn mixes of my own music from Cubase onto an external CD drive, as I still feel this is a useful way to share music. Do you know anything about that?

 

I have an account on Outlook.com - Microsoft free personal email and it has a feature called OneDrive that backs up documents. It may be cloud technology, but I don't know.

 

Don't know if you can burn directly from Cubase. That will depend on whether the software recognizes the third party burner. But you should be able to export a file specifically for CD burning that you can then burn to disc with something like Nero.

 

email it to yourself..it will stay stored free on your email server

 

????
why you buy one without a DVD burner?
Nothing comes with a CD-ROM anymore, they almost all use DVD burners, if you pay for it.
There are some at the low end of the price range that do not have a DVD built-in, if you need to uses an optical drive, why buy one without it?

anywho, I go with an external drive, WD MyBook, an internal hard drive and flash drives, and make multiple backup across these media for important stuff.

Don't like the whole "cloud storage" crap. I want to have control over my content/files and know where they are physically located.

 

only if it's an IMAP email service and not POP3.
IMAP retains the messages on the server, POP3 deletes them as soon as you retrieve them.
IMAP usually costs a lot more than a POP3 account, but it is often offered by many ISP's.

Different email systems explained ❖ Richard Flynn

 

Yes I was thinking perhaps Nero. I've used it before.Thanks.

 

I meant an all in one DVD/CD burner. Nothing within my price range came with one built in. In fact I couldn't find any online at all.

 

I think if it has a CD tray you might be able to buy an app that does what you're looking for. Did you try the app store?

 

Practically no new laptops have cd trays built in. Everything's gone digital/online.

 

At the higher price ranges too. Try getting a 15" Dell XPS with an optical drive. Give it two more years and optical drives will have gone the way of the Dodo.

 

I don't know about IMAP but my POP3 account has unlimited space and messages are deleted from the server when my e-mail software says so, meaning whatever I set it to.

 

i'm no computer geek but my email has unlimited space and the same settings......i can log in at the library and view a document someone emailed to me a year ago....scans...photos....music...all of it

 

in the old days a back up was another piece of paper behind the carbon paper

 

If it's something I may use away from home, I have a memory stick with a small velcro pouch that hooks to my key chain.