A CD-R or CD-RW or DVD-R or DVD-RW will do.
You can use your laptop to back uup your hard drive but your USB is not the thing getting backed up.
Use an external hard drive, or USB Flash drive.
If you have alot of data, you can buy and esternal drive, or buy a second hard drive, and put it inside the machine and use it as a back up storage drive. You can buy a decent size hard drive online shipped for 60 dollars or less.
Possibly with another Hard drive or with a good amount of double sided dual Layer DVD's. Depending on the size of the hard drive. basically you use a backup program.
I use acronis migrate easy. It is cheap, easy to use, and works great. Allows you to copy data from one hard drive to another that is smaller, exact size, or larger. It proportions the partition accordingly.
Drive Formatting is when you prepare the hard drive or other media for use by the operating system and puts a file system on it such as FAT32 or NTFS. The process erases all the data on your hard drive (important to back it up). That way you can use your hard drive for the first time or get to use it again after the data on it becomes severely corrupted or the operating system fails.
External hard drives can use data from an internal hard drive as often as you'd like. To do this, you must have backup software installed on each drive that will allow you to back up the drive when necessary, even if you are not in front of your computer.
Yes, as long as there is an available USB port. Keep in mind that the throughput will be very low, so reading and writing to/from the external hard drive may be very slow, and you may not be able to burn discs at a very high rate.
I would suggest installing windows on one hard drive, then installing ubuntu on the same hard drive. Use the other hard drive for the backups (partition it).
All computers use a hard drive to store programs and files.
If it's DVDs you want to back up to your hard drive, use DVD Shrink 3.2 or DVD Decrypter (Freeware, can be found with a search engine).
DVD-RW DVD-RW discs can be used by some operating systems like MS Vista as regular recordable discs, meaning that you cannot alter what is recorded on them without erasing and recording new alter version of the same file. They cab be also used almost identically as hard drive, where you can record for example MS Word and alter it by opening it by Word application. In situation when you are using it as hard drive (or old fashion floppy disc for that matter), it has to be formated before such use.