These magnetic disks are very popular for several reasons. But how do HDDs work and why are they still so popular? HDDs work by using two or more magnetic heads, attached to a moving arm, which reads the data from one or more rigid rotating disks coated with a magnetic material. You will find these inside your servers, home computers, laptops and gaming consoles. An archive can be seen as a collection of long-term records designed to archive data usually to cover a possible future requirement for historical data Typically, archives will be stored for longer than 5 years, whilst backups are updated over time and will not usually be kept for this long. A backup is a copy of data (typically stored in an alternate location) that can be used to recover in the event of disaster.

One thing to consider when deciding the storage media, you are going to use, is whether it is for archiving or backups. Today we will be looking into some of the more common storage media. Every storage media has its advantages and drawbacks, by weighing these up, you can decide what type of storage is best for your needs. One of the questions we see most at Macrium Software is: what type of storage should I be using? This may seem like an easy question on the surface, however, the more you investigate this question, the more difficult it becomes.

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