There are many factors that could leave John in a precarious position with respect to backup negligence. John has not entertained the possibility of theft. If John left his laptop unattended or even in his car and it was stolen, all of John's data would be gone with nothing to show for it. Imagine this, John showing up for class telling his instructor his laptop was stolen and all his work was on it. Data can be corrupted and hard disks can fail. When a hard disk fails from an OS problem data can frequently be recovered but when a hard disk physically fails data cannot be recovered with spending thousands of dollars which most of us do not want to spend. Accidental deletion is another way John could lose his much coveted schoolwork. Virus infections, sabotage and natural disasters could cause John to lose his data. Last year, I'm sure no one imagined that Shockoe bottom would have been flooded to the point of floating cars and buses. Without prior planning and system backups, businesses and people would find themselves in a quandary. According to the University of Texas Center for Research on Information Systems, 90% of all businesses experiencing total data loss are out of business within the next two years and 50% never reopen their doors. Wow!

John is now convinced he should perform regular data backups but is unsure how he should do it. First, you must consider what you want to back up and the byte size that is needed. John needs to select the proper medium to fit his mission. Although not recommended, if John only needs to backup one or two files he could do it on a floppy disk (maximum capacity 1.44MB). Floppies are very sensitive to heat and, magnetism. A zip drive is similar to a floppy disk and it's capacity ranges from 100MB to 1GB depending on model. Tape drives are used mostly businesses applications for large volume backups. The draw back on tapes drives is they are slow and do not posses random access capability. Removable storage drives come in a variety of sizes that may work well for a backup solution. Removable storage drives capacity ranges from 128MG thumb drive to 4.78GB DVD (Digital Video Disk) drive. The next step would be a removable hard drive that can have just about any capacity in relation to today's standards. Network backups are another option of backup.