MANILA, Philippines -- Personal storage devices will continue to make a killing as users continue to accumulate loads of digital content more than what their PCs can handle, according to an IDC Asia Pacific report.

A recent IDC survey shows that users prefer to back-up digital content -- defined as both personal and downloaded from the Internet -- onto a CD or by copying data to an external hard disk drive.

Using a DVD burner is also the third most popular choice of backing up data. On the other hand, only a small percentage said they use online storage services.

Claudio Checchia, IDC research manager for consumer markets, noted that the explosion in digital content is brought about by a growing number of residential broadband users in countries across the region.

Aside from this, penetration of consumer electronics devices, such as portable MP3 players, gaming consoles, digital cameras and camcorders, is also growing rapidly, adding to the consumption of digital content.

?The explosion in the amount of digital content consumers handle is expected to generate solid demand for recordable optical drives and hard disk drives (or HDDs) used in PCs and other personal storage devices,? Cheechia said in IDC's report.

On the other hand, he said this also raises new issues concerning the storage, backing up and sharing of large digital multimedia files.

IDC?s survey shows that respondents from China showed the highest percentage of those with less than 100 gigabytes of data, followed by India, Korea, Malaysia and Hong Kong.