With All These Products, Backing Up Isn’t Hard to Do

Whenever I write about the importance of backing up your business data, I feel like I’m being preachy. “Yeah, right,” I hear you say. “I really should make backup copies, but it’s such a hassle.”

It doesn’t have to be anymore. New devices and services that are hitting the market not only make it easy to back up your files, but they’re also cheap and easy to install and use.

Iomega, whose 100-megabyte Zip drive has been around for years, last month refreshed its line with a new 250-megabyte version that not only stores 2 1/2 times as much data as earlier drives but can also be installed in minutes, thanks to its USB interface. The interface lets you just plug it into the USB port that is available on virtually all PCs built within the last two to three years and all Macs built in the last year. The $179 device weighs about a pound and is only 1 inch thick.

Iomega also makes a USB version of its popular 100mb Zip drive.

Imation now offers a new USB version of its 120mb SuperDisk drive, which is also capable of reading and writing standard 3 1/2-inch floppy disks. One advantage to an external USB device is that you can easily move it between machines so one device can be used to back up several machines.

Now that PCs come with hard drives that store several gigabytes, you might turn your nose up at a device that can only back up 100, 120 or even 250 megabytes. But remember, you only need to back up your data, not your software. Having to reinstall software from the original CD-ROMs is a hassle, but being without your data can be a disaster.

My strategy is to keep all of my vital data files in a single directory and back up that directory. In my case, it fits on a single 250-megabyte Zip disk or two 100-megabyte Zip disks. Another option, which takes up far less storage, is to archive older files and just back up new files or those that have changed recently.

Of course, you can get higher-capacity backup systems. Iomega makes both 1-gigabyte and 2gb Jazz drives, which are fast and easy to work with. Aiwa, Hewlett-Packard and other companies offer tape backup systems starting at under $100. Aiwa’s $100 TD-8000 tape drive, for example, can store up to 8 gigabytes of compressed data on a single tape cassette. In April, the company rolled out a cool-looking, translucent blue $249 version designed for the Apple iMac. The drive, which can back up to 40 megabytes a minute, plugs directly into the iMac’s USB port.

Another option is an external hard drive. For $349 you can buy a DataZone 2.1gb DataBook hard drive that plugs into the parallel port of any Windows PC. As with the USB devices, it’s a portable external drive that can easily be moved from one PC to another. The company also makes drives that plug into the USB port or PC card ports on laptop machines in capacities ranging up to 14 gigabytes.

CD writers are another potential backup system. For about $200, you can buy a device such as the Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus that lets you copy your PC files to a CD-ROM. They’re not as fast as hard drives or Zip disks but the recordable CDs themselves are cheap (as little as $1 for a 600mb disk) and easy to store.

Finally, there’s the Internet. A number of services will let you back up your files to offline servers.

The advantage of these systems is that they’re easy to use, don’t require any special equipment and, by definition, provide you with an off-premises backup that is secure even if something disastrous happens at your place of business.

For $99 a year, @Backup (https://www.backup.com) will store up to 100 megabytes of data on its servers. The price includes an unlimited number of backups, and the ability to schedule automatic (unattended) backup at night or whenever your machines are idle. For an additional $11 a month, the company will send you your data on CD-ROM or you can special-order a CD of your data for $39.

With all these options, there’s no longer any reason to sing “backing up is hard to do.”

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com.