Every one is going gaga over the usual roles played by the pen drives but another very important role being played by large capacity pen drives is that of a backup medium. Traditionally people used floppies, zip disks and rewritable compact disks for taking backups but with the advent of pen drives the way people look at taking backup has changed forever. From being a burden the task of taking a backup has become a pleasure now. The enormous capacity of the new pen drives make it possible for a person to take the entire backup at a stretch which otherwise would have required the changing f so many disks and that too with an uncertainty whether the backup will be readable or not.

The floppies and later on the zip drives and then the compacts disks, with their limited capacities made life miserable for any computer user who stored important data on his machine which require regular backup. The floppies had no alternative for long so they survived. The zip disk had competition from the compact disk so they vanished from the backup market very quickly. But all these mediums of backup along with the DVD and the tape drives require additional expenditure in hardware and the mediums is also pretty expensive too. With the coming of the jumbo capacity pen drive with a capacity exceeding 16 GB backup has never looked so easy. Any backup software which supports a removable drive will take a backup on the pen drive. The success of the pen drive as a backup medium has been due to its easy availability, low cost of ownership, reliability, jumbo size storage capacity and unlimited read write cycles making it as the preferred medium for backup. Going after the success of the pen drive manufacturer are coming up with solid state backup drives which employ the same technology as the pen drive but have additional data safety technology built in.