Backup to CD. How to back up to CD properly.

If you need to back up a large set of files that has reasonable overall size (less than 10GB or so), you may well be wanting to backup to CD. It may be worthwhile to organize one's data before a backup to CD to make it easier to navigate through the backups later.

Back up on Good Quality CD Discs

When backing up to CD, it is important to use good quality media. Good media quality pays when one needs to write and restore discs. It also grants one assuredness that the backup will be done successfully.

Ensure that You Can Use CDs for Writing Backups

The next step is to check whether the discs can be written to. There is no problem with a blank CD-R disc, but what if a CD-R disc was used for writing? Can it be continued by writing another session on it? Brand new CD-RWs need to be formatted before use. Usually a backup program has this option.

Backing up to CD

What regards the very process of backing up to cd, everything is pretty simple. One either just writes the data to discs manually using Windows Explorer (though this may be inconvenient), or uses a backup program, which also can compress and encrypt files and do everything on a schedule. In both cases, one just needs to swap the CDs when one is full. A backup program prompts for this automatically.

Verifying CD backups

After a backup is completed, one needs to verify that the data has been written successfully either manually, by copying several files back, or by using a backup program.

Marking Your CD Backups

Finally, to be able to quickly restore backup, don't forget to number the discs, in order to distinguish them from each other. You can use a marker, a sticker or something like this. During restoration, a backup program will ask you to insert CDs in order they were recorded. Writing a short description on each disc or the whole backup set may also be useful.