Vocabulary Practice: Data Storage

Read the text again and answer the questions with some of the words in bold.

Over-reliance on technology has its risks. We copy and save everything, but at the same time forget that electronic devices (and by extension what is stored on them) aren’t indestructible and may in fact break down, crash or malfunction. Should that come to be you are at risk of losing all your data. To mitigate the risk of that happening, you need do your due diligence beforehand.

Back up your files regularly and never save important files on the same drive as your OS.
Don’t use USB flash drives for data storage as they have a finite number of write cycles which means the more files you copy onto the drive, the higher the likelihood of device failure. Another drawback is that USB flash drives have a relatively small capacity.

Optical storage i.e. archiving data on CDs, DVDs and other optical disks is a better and cheaper solution in terms of capacity. However, many laptops no longer come with CD / DVD drives so it may be impossible to read such data in the future.

External HDDs offer even greater capacity, but they have many moving parts which means they are prone to failure especially when dropped. In addition, the average life of an external HDD is approximately 3-4 years.

Currently cloud-based storage services such as Dropbox or Google Drive are gaining in popularity.

All of these solutions have advantages and disadvantages. To avoid data loss, it is a good idea to use multiple devices and different formats.