Spend a Little or a Lot, but Back Up You Must

You’ve probably got some pretty important information on your PC’s hard disk. Lose any of it and you could end up in big trouble, especially if it’s your client’s business records or your child’s school report on whales.

But common power outages, natural disasters such as earthquakes, fire or flood, software enigmas, the swift strike of a computer virus or even the mistake of pressing the wrong combination of keys can cause files to be lost or ruined. Copying or backing up the important files stashed on your PC’s hard disk onto floppy disks or tapes is the best safeguard.

When 40 megabytes was considered a large hard drive, many people believed that floppy disks were perfectly OK for backing up. But with the size of today’s application programs, and the number of them that most people have on their systems, you might spend days reloading applications after a disk crash. And some data files are now so big they won’t even fit on a single floppy. When it comes to backups, therefore, floppies just don’t cut it anymore.

So what does? How much money do you have? The general rule for backup formats is that the more convenient, the more expensive.

The best all-around choice for backups is a tape backup drive. For one thing, they’re cheap. You should be able to find 350- to 450-megabyte tape drives for less than $100, 850-megabyte drives for less than $200 and 1-gigabyte drives for about $400.

While tape drives are very reliable, the downside is that using a tape drive can be a slow process. The speed of the backups shouldn’t be too much of a problem, though, because any worthwhile software lets you schedule unattended backups. If your system backs itself up at 3 a.m. each day, who really cares whether it takes 10 minutes or an hour?

That brings up one important point. Whatever capacity tape drive you buy, make sure it’s big enough to hold everything you want to back up on one tape. If you don’t, you won’t be able to make any unattended backups. The technology is good, but the one thing no tape drive can do is change tapes for you.

If you want a backup device with a little extra functionality, check out removable hard drives. Specifically, they are the EZ135 removable hard drive by Syquest and the Zip Drive by Iomega. The EZ135 uses 135-megabyte, 3.5-inch cartridges and the Zip Drive uses 100-megabyte, 3.5-inch cartridges. Both drives sell for less than $200, and cartridges for either are in the $20 range.

Which one is better? My take is that the Zip Drive is easier to use, but the EZ135 is a bit faster. I’ve seen good reviews of both. Just keep in mind that if the amount of data you plan to back up exceeds the capacity of one of these drives (with compression, that means anything over 200 megabytes or so), you won’t be able to do unattended backups.

I recommend holding off on using CD recordable drives as a backup system just yet: At nearly $1,000, they’re just too expensive.

How often should you make a backup? That all depends on what you’re backing up. You only need to back up your application files when you add or modify an application. However, when you do back up your application files, I suggest you back up all of them, not just the files that changed. That way you can be sure you have fresh, up-to-date copies of everything.

Of course, if you have a tape drive (call me paranoid or just plain smart from experience), you might as well back up as much data as will fit on one tape every single night. All you do is set the backup software to run during the wee hours and forget about it.

However, you should have at least two backup tapes and rotate them daily. If you leave the same tape in all the time and the tape is bad, you could lose everything. If you rotate among two or three tapes, the most you’ll lose is one day’s work.

There is no cast-in-stone backup regimen to follow other than one cardinal rule: Whenever the possible loss of information on your PC is greater than the time, effort and energy you spent creating the information, it’s time to make a backup. Backups are like insurance policies: You may never need it, but if you do, you’re sure glad you have it.

Kim Komando is a Fox TV host, syndicated talk radio host and founder of the Komputer Klinic on America Online (keyword KOMANDO). She can be reached via e-mail at komando@komando.com