2. Storage on the Mac where am I going to keep it all? oo-er, I think my drive has failed…

3. Storage on the Mac Storage is all aboutBACKUp Schofields law of data : if you only have one copy of any piece of data, then it does not really exist !

4. Storage on the Mac Magnetic media (floppy disks, Zip disks, hard drives) Optical media (CD, DVD) Solid state ( memory stick, USB, thumb, pen, key, flash.. ) Online (.Mac, ISPs, host sites)

5. Magnetic media Pros: FAST! ( read / write times ) cheap ( around 50p per GB for hard drives ) generally reliable Cons: disks can degrade (develop bad sectors) over time hard drives WILL fail (some day) - regard this as an inevitability and plan your storage accordingly

6. Magnetic media Floppy disks

7. Magnetic media ZIP disks (Iomega) ( 100 MB, 250 MB, 1 GB ) Fast, reliable, still operational ( Drivers contained within every Mac system since OS9 ) Expensive Superseded by memory sticks Ideal for: exchange / backup of small documents

8. Magnetic media External hard drives ( 4 GB up to 1 TB or more ) Fast and cheap (50p per GB) FireWire (faster than USB2) May include backup software (e.g. Retrospect) Can be partitioned when new (there are pros and cons) Ideal for: weekly backups of your Macs entire hard drive, and daily backups, e.g. Home folder, iTunes, iPhoto

9. Magnetic media External hard drives R idiculous A cronym to I mpress D ummies R edundant A rray of I nexpensive D isks Multiple hard drives can be linked together in what is called a RAID

10. Optical media Pros: Cheap Burners and software included with most Macs Versatile ( can store music, video, or data, ready to go ) Cons: SLOW! ( read times, and even worse write times ) disks will not last forever, nowhere near the time that shop-bought music and films will last ( it makes sense to buy good quality disks )

11. Optical media CD - 80 minutes AIFF audio, 650 MB data DVD - 60 minutes HQ video, 4.3 GB of data Can use either -R disks (burn once) -RW (re-write, re-use) Imminent: Blu-ray & HD DVD formats will provide from 15 to 30+ GB of storage space Ideal for: permanent (archive) data backups, creating a bootable CD or DVD, storing your music and video

12. Solid state media Pros: No moving parts to crash or fail Works out of the box Compact and convenient Range of memory sizes ( from 128MB up to 4 GB ) Cons: slower read/write times than magnetic ( but infinitely faster than optical ) are pre-formatted in PC FAT-16 - if you dont needto share data with PCs, then reformat as Mac OS in Disk Utility ( will improve read / write times dramatically )

13. Solid state media Ideal for: versatile backup and storage needs Use low capacity drives for documents, settings, exchanging files with other users Use medium capacity for email etc Use high capacity for applications, music, etc

14. Online (.Mac ISPs File host websites ) Pros: If your computer crashes, you still have your data Cons: Useful space ( > 1 GB ) mostly needs to be paid for Transfer speeds How secure is your data?

15. Online (.Mac ) Designed for Macs, so many useful features Expensive ( $75 annual sub ) Extra space ( > 1 GB ) costs Has many critics!

16. Online ( ISPs ) Often give 1 GB space free to subscribers - e.g. BT does, Im not sure tiscali does If they give you the space, use it (or lose it?)

17. Online ( File host websites ) Ideal for pictures: Photobucket.com ImageShack Large files: Megaupload.com --> ( 30 days ) Personal data: box.net --> ( 10 MB max ) Everyones heard of YouTube and Flickr, but there are loads of hosts !