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You press one button to pop popcorn in the microwave. You press one button to close your garage door. You press one button to start up your PC, and you press one button to sync your PDA with your PC. One button is easy to understand; one button, you can remember how it works.

The need for simplicity is why so many of today's external storage drives offer the ease of one-button backups. Press one button, and you can back up your system, making copies of all your vital info, photos, and MP3s--so your data is safe from the menaces of viruses, accidental deletion, and sudden hard-drive death.

Of course, today's backup products are more than just a hard drive and a button. Some devices integrate features like media card slots, USB hubs, or print servers; still others have RAID for added data redundancy. Often drives bundle backup applications that can further automate your backups--even if no button is in sight. (See "Burlier Backup Software Helps Safeguard Data" for more information on these utilities.)

Narrowing down your backup-device choices from among the plethora of available storage products is the first step. Optical discs continue to be useful for archival backups of photos and other data you intend to store for the long haul; but for everyday system backups, you can't beat the convenience and speed of external hard drives for full backups. Not only are hard drives reasonably priced, but their high capacity means your PC can perform full-drive backups unattended, without your having to swap discs.

We evaluated 16 external hard drives, divided into three categories. The first category features seven USB- and FireWire-connected hard drives suitable for single-PC backup. The second category includes six devices that connect to your network via ethernet and provide an easy-to-access backup destination for multiple PCs. The final category addresses high-capacity or redundant backup needs using direct-attached storage; the three devices of this type can connect to your desktop PC or to a server, and, in the configurations we tested, offer up to 1.6 terabytes of storage.

Most of these storage devices can do more than just backups. However, for this review we evaluated each product for its viability as a backup device, and the PC World Test Center structured its tests accordingly. We measured performance by using Windows XP's Explorer to copy 3.06GB of files and folders, and then by conducting a full, 12.1GB system backup using the software bundled with each product. If the product lacked backup software, as many of the network-attached and direct-connected RAID drives did, we tested it with EMC Dantz's Retrospect Professional 7, our 2005 World Class pick for backup software.

We tested each device with file compression turned off and verification at the default setting; likewise, we tested the drives using their default file system--FAT32 or NTFS--and RAID settings. We tested the network drives using their ethernet connection over a gigabit ethernet switch; for the remaining devices, we tested using USB 2.0.

A few of the products stood out: In the single-drive category, we selected Western Digital's 320GB Dual-option Media Center as the Best Buy for its physical design (which includes media card slots and a USB hub). In the networked category, Maxtor's 300GB Shared Storage Drive earned a Best Buy for its features and design. Silicon Image's SV2000 was a favorite in the direct-attached category because of its speed--nothing else came close. Unfortunately, while the vendor's suggested price for the unit is $1195, the best price we could find at press time was a whopping $2200, which prevented us from declaring the 800GB unit a Best Buy.

Beyond Big Drive Backup

Want to further hone your backup regimen? DVD is well suited to archiving, as well as to backing up specific content to complement your full system backup; consult our Top 10 DVD Drives chart for our picks. If portability, not capacity, is your goal, see our review of pocket-size hard drives and USB flash-memory drives that you can use as an alternative to DVD. If off-site redundancy, or hardware-free backup, is what you're after, the five online backup services we review will deliver, albeit at a price. We've also pulled together a collection of shareware and freeware backup utilities from our Downloads library.

Alan Stafford is PC World's senior writer.