Upgrade Guide

Psst, here's some great advice: Back up your data.

Heard that before, eh?

Yes, it's probably second only to eat your vegetables as good advice that's often ignored.

But you ignore it at your peril. Hard drives have grown vastly more reliable, but they can still fail.

And everyone occasionally erases crucial files--a problem that becomes particularly common if a coworker or family member shares your PC.

Tape drives remain an excellent choice to back up all your data and applications. They're not as fast as removable-cartridge drives, but they can accommodate the contents of today's big hard drives, letting you back up everything in one fell swoop. Also, tape cartridges are much less expensive than removable cartridges. And the latest tape drives come with emergency recovery software that allows you to restore data from your backup tape without having to reinstall Windows 95 first--a major hassle in the past.

When picking a drive, your first consideration should be cartridge capacity. Note that capacity is measured in terms of compressed data. The backup software that comes with the drives compresses the data as it backs it up, with an average compression ratio of 2 to 1. (Compressed files such as .zip files or DriveSpace files won't be further compressed.) So a drive rated at 8GB physically holds only 4GB. You can choose not to compress data, but that slows down the backup process.

Plan for expansion when you choose your drive. You may have a 2GB hard drive now, but if you're considering upgrading it in the future, buy a tape drive that'll handle the bigger capacity. (Yes, you can use multiple tapes to back up a big hard drive, but it's a pain.)

Prices of tape drives, like those of all PC hardware, just keep falling. You can find drives in the 2GB-to-3GB range for $120 to $160, while 4GB-to-6GB drives usually sell for around $200. And 8GB drives, which are becoming the standard for PCs with large drives, cost roughly $250. Major brands for desktop tape backup drives include Hewlett-Packard , Iomega, and Seagate.

Travan tape cartridges from Imation are the standard for desktop backup. Cartridge prices start at about $17 per tape for lower capacities, and reach a maximum of about $28 each for the 8GB tapes. You can't beat this price--way less than a penny per megabyte.

Tape drives for desktop PCs come in external parallel-port and internal EIDE versions. (SCSI tape drives offer greater speed and storage capacity, but they cost much more and are designed primarily for network servers.) External drives are the simplest to install and can be moved easily between PCs, but they're slower--about one-half to one-quarter the speed of internal drives. Performance varies by product model, but you can figure on 20MB to 40MB per minute for parallel-port drives, and 40MB to 60MB per minute for EIDE drives.

Installing tape drives is straightforward. Here are steps for installing both parallel-port and internal drives. Once you're done, be sure to perform those regular backups--and eat your vegetables!