Small Office: Big Backups

If all the to-do about Y2K has done nothing else, it at least has raised awareness in small and home offices of the need to back up data. We know backups don't make your PC or applications run any faster--nor do they give you any noticeable benefits until you lose data. Then again, if you're like many small-business types and you do lose data, you may not get a second chance. A major data loss, or even a two- or three-day interruption in normal business flow, may just put you under.

You say you have all your data files backed up on Zip disks? That's better than nothing--especially if you have time for the daily disk shuffle required to keep all those superfloppies updated. But what if your whole system goes down? At the least, you'll probably have to spend hours reinstalling Windows and all your applications--never mind the time it will take to get all the preferences reconfigured to your liking. This process can take anywhere from one to several days. No one can afford to be out of business that long.

You need a real, automated backup solution. And that means tape backup. We're not talking about the cheap, smaller drives that cost about $150 and max out at about 10GB. We mean drives with cartridges that hold from about 14GB to 20GB a pop: enough to back up your operating system, all your apps, and your data. You'll be able to schedule automatic weekly backups of your whole system and automate daily updates of your new and changed files. Then, if your system goes down you can be back up and running in hours rather than days--with little significant data loss.

There's nothing surer or more convenient than automated backup, and tape drives have the clear capacity advantage over CD-Rewritable and DVD-RAM drives. Tape cartridges are also small, sturdy, and easy to store.

We limited our testing mostly to the IDE (also known as EIDE or ATAPI) drives that are most suited to the average SOHO user, eschewing DAT and higher-end formats that are used mostly for server backups. However, we did include some 20GB Travan SCSI models that work well with small servers. In addition, we checked out one portable parallel port model to see if this convenient interface was fast enough to be practical for high-capacity backups.

Eight Drives That Can Save Your Business

Once you've realized that you need to make backup an intrinsic part of your business process, how do you decide which product to buy? Walking into your local superstore won't help: Most of the salespeople won't know any more about backup hardware than you do. To help you make the choice, we put together a comprehensive evaluation of eight high-capacity tape backup drives appropriate for serious small-office backup. We reviewed models from tape veterans Hewlett-Packard, Seagate, and Tecmar--and added a couple of high-capacity models from newcomer OnStream.

The contenders are HP's Colorado 14GB (IDE and parallel port interface), HP's 20GB SureStore T20i (SCSI), OnStream's 30GB DI30 (IDE) and SC30 (SCSI), Seagate's 20GB TapeStor (IDE and SCSI), and Tecmar's classy 20GB NS20 IDE drive. Except for HP's parallel port drive, all the drives we tested were internal models. You can buy external versions of the SCSI drives--but expect to pay from $80 to $100 more for them. Because the internal SCSI models already cost from $150 to $200 more than IDE counterparts, external drives can get expensive. Still, you may need to choose one of them if you're out of drive bays.

All but two of the internal drives (the 5.25-inch OnStream models) mount in either a 3.5-inch bay or a 5.25-inch bay using adapter rails. Adapter rails and faceplates were included in all the kits and came preattached on the HP and Tecmar drives.

All the drives do a good job of handling basic backup duties, but they vary significantly in price and performance. Except for OnStream's Echo software, the easy-to-use backup programs bundled with the drives had far more similarities than differences. All the software lets you prepare for disaster recovery using a bootable floppy and a full backup. If you prepare properly, you'll find that you can restore your system without having to reinstall your OS. Keep in mind that SCSI drives will require you to put SCSI drivers on your emergency-restore disk.

The two OnStream drives were prerelease hardware with late-beta software, so performance and features may change slightly in the products' final incarnation.