Ultimate Backup Guide

You're as nervous as a diamond cutter on a roller coaster. Your precious gem--your PC's hard disk--has started to make a disturbing chattering sound. That's when it hits you: Your data is probably toast, and your backups are laughably out of date. Never mind how long it will take to reinstall your applications--you also face weeks of laboriously scanning paper documents, reentering your worksheets, rebuilding your customer database, and extracting all of those MP3s from your CDs.

For many people, backing up is an unpleasant chore. We make lots of excuses not to do it: It takes too much time, it's too much hassle, it costs too much. But we at PC World uncovered several inexpensive backup options that are surprisingly fast and easy to use: portable external hard drives; rewritable DVD drives; and network-attached storage (NAS) devices, which are useful for backing up a PC or a small network via an ethernet connection.

Back when hard drives were measured in megabytes, savvy users and businesses relied on the only automated backup option of the time: a tape drive. Everyone else used the humble floppy disk; prayed that they wouldn't accidentally corrupt or delete essential files; or hoped against hope that their hard drives wouldn't die.

Today's jumbo hard drives can store many gigabytes of data that you'll want to back up. For this review we ran ten storage devices through a series of tests overseen by the PC World Test Center. The drives we looked at represent a wide range of technologies both new (like rewritable DVD) and established (like tape)--and all of them are suitable for backup tasks.

We grouped products according to the size and type of backup that users normally need to perform: smaller backups of under 2GB; medium-size backups of 2GB to 20GB; and complete backups that often exceed 20GB and reproduce the entire contents of the hard drive, including its OS, applications, and data.

In the under-2GB category, we examined three drives, none of which are designed for backing up huge data sets: the Fujitsu DynaMO 1300U2 ($299), a 1.3GB magneto-optical USB 2.0 drive; the Iomega Zip 250MB USB-Powered Drive ($149); and the Plextor PlexWriter 40/12/ 40A internal CD-RW drive ($140).

For the 2GB-to-20GB category, we tested several types of rewritable DVD drives: the $500 Hewlett-Packard Dvd200i DVD+RW drive, the $460 Pioneer DVR-A04 DVD-RW drive, and the $380 QPS DVDBurner DVD-RAM/R drive. In addition, we evaluated Iomega's $229 HDD 20GB Portable Hard Drive, an external FireWire (IEEE 1394) hard disk drive.

The final category covers backups exceeding 20GB. Here we focused on big drives that are great for handling fully automated backups: CMS Peripherals' $399 ABSplus for Desktops, an 80GB external hard drive with built-in software that automatically backs up your system; Interactive Media's $290 80GB KanguruDisk, a removable hard drive that docks in a desktop's internal drive bay; Quantum's $849 Snap Server 1100, a NAS device for small networks; and Exabyte's $798 VXA-1 Tape Drive. VXA tape has a very high capacity and works extremely well for full-system, automated backups.

Get Your Backup

These drives differ substantially in technology, but it's useful to compare them on measures of speed and usability. The chores: doing a full backup of 10GB, performing an incremental backup (in which we backed up only the 500MB of new files previously added to our system's hard disk), and copying 500MB of files from a PC to a backup drive (the exception here was the tape drive, which does not work with software that lets you copy files via a drag-and-drop interface).

We tested CMS's ABSplus, Interactive Media's KanguruDisk, Iomega's HDD Portable Hard Drive, and Quantum's Snap Server using the default settings of their bundled backup software; for all of the remaining drives, we used Stomp's $79 BackUp MyPC, which has data verification enabled by default. Hewlett-Packard includes a basic backup package, Simple Backup, with its Dvd200i, but this program can't do incremental backups; for consistency, we used BackUp MyPC in both of our tests with this drive.

The results didn't surprise us: Backup hard drives zoomed, tape storage dragged, and optical storage generally ranged between those extremes. As you might expect, low-capacity removable media drives demand a lot of babysitting during large backups. In our tests, we had to use 13 discs with the Plextor CD-RW drive to complete a full backup, and we had to insert each disc twice--once for the backup and once for data verification.

Still, for smaller backups, the affordable CD-RW drive gets our nod. For medium-size backups of 20GB or less, a DVD+RW drive will serve you well. And for very large volumes of data, you'll appreciate the convenience of an external hard drive.

Of course, no single backup solution fits every environment. A CD-RW drive isn't viable for backing up several systems over a network; NAS is overkill for a single desktop. Our evaluations take speed and cost into account, but you should also consider the drive's portability (a must for backing up systems at multiple work sites); the media's capacity (which determines how many passes it will take to complete your backup); and the suitability of the media for off-site storage.