Which backup is right for You? - Computers - http://maxpages.com/nanotechnology/Backup

Some day your machine will crash-- and the only way to restore it is to have a complete backup, with your programs, system settings, and data. This used to mean a pile of floppy disks or a giant tape drive, but rewritable optical media are now much more affordable than in the past--and more compact.

Rewritable CD drives, or CD-RW drives, are the most diely available. Some manufacturers offer them as a built-in option and CD-RWs which can be written over and over. At $1 each, CD-R are significantly cheaper and produce fewer errors than $12 CD-RW disks. Most CD-RW drives come with backup management software. Hewlett-Packard, for example, includes a utility that runs periodic system-saves in the background. Mastering audio CDs is also quite simple--look for a drive bundled with music software from Adaptec and others.

Rewritable DVD drives are a good choice for office backup and for storing video or audio work. Two formats are available: DVD+RW (3 GB capacity per disk) and DVD-RAM (5.2 GB). While it's not clear yet which will become the standard, even greater capacities, up to 9.4 GB, are anticipated. If your PC supports FireWire connections, look for them in both CD and DVD drives, to enable faster data-transfer speeds.

Make systems backup every six months for home PCs, and copy key files more often. Daily backups are wise for business users. Products like PowerQuest's DataKeeper (49.95) Make backups every time you modifly a file, and compression software can fit it all on a smaller number of disks. Drive-imageing tools will make an exact copy of a hardrive, including preferences and partition, to move to another PC. Overall backing up your system is a very inexpensive insurance policy.

Options and Prices.

DVD-RAM

A big inital investment, the QPS Que! ($599) and other recorable DVD drives pay off for office backups and bulky multimedia files. They can read CDs too.

$30 per disk
5.2 GB campacity

= 0.6 cents per MB

CD-RW

Rewritable CD drives from Philips and other are affordable ($100 and up)k\ and can write audio CDs. CD-R disks are cheap but can only be written once.

$1 per disk
650 MB disk capacity

=0.15 cents per MB

ZIP

Zip drives are ubiquitous and inexpensive, but the capcity is only 100MB or 250MB.

$10 per disk
100MB disk capacity

=10 cents per MB

SUPER DISK

High capacity floppies developed by Imation have been trumped by CD-RW, but moble users appreciate their small size.

$13 per disk
120MB disk capacity

=11 cents per MB

Excerted from:

Home Office Computing (CurtCo FREEDOM Group)
www.hoc.smalloffice.com from all editions, 1999-2000

PC Computing November 1997 Copyright

Fortune December 7th, 8th 1998 Copyright

CommuniQue March 1998 edition Issue 89 Copyright.

Chris Yurko from Home Office magazine

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Page Updated Wed Jun 6, 2001 5:25pm EDT