Move Forward By Backing Up -- Tape Backups Offer A Low-Cost Solution For Protecting Valuable Information

BACKUP: It's the most important word in computing.

But most of us never get around to it. That's a big mistake.

Backing up means copying your disk contents and then putting the copy away somewhere safe. Without backups, you can lose the most valuable part of your computer: your information. A virus can attack, a disk can crash, a child can fool around, your house could catch fire or crumble in an earthquake or you could just make a stupid mistake and erase things.

The cost of not backing up can be measured in dollars if you lose track of people who owe you money or potential customers. It can be time - re-creating the information, if you even can, and reinstalling your programs. Or it can be reputation - missing deadlines or failing to respond to faxes, e-mail and calls.

At home, you're talking painful looks from the kids; at the office, you're talking embarrassment and tens of thousands of dollars of time spent recovering. Driving without insurance is illegal in some states. Sometimes I think computing without backup should be against the law, too.

Problem is, the old method of backing up doesn't work so well anymore. Once you could copy to a few floppy disks. In an era of gigabyte (1,000 megabytes) drives and enormous multimedia files, that just isn't practical because that could mean shuffling hundreds of floppies each time you back up.

Cheap and easy

You need some other recording device to hold your backup files,

something inexpensive, easy and storable. Removable disks - such as Syquest's EZ135 and Iomega's Zip - are wonderful things, but even they need 10 disks (at $20 each) to back up a gigabyte drive. Drives that work with removable disks that hold a gigabyte cost too much.

So far, only tape offers low-cost drives and low-cost media. The drives cost as little as $150 and the tapes as little as $15. And they'll hold 500 megabytes to a full gigabyte or more on a single cassette-sized tape. Better yet, many tape drives are small boxes that connect to a printer port, so you can use the same drive with many computers.

The major disadvantage of tape backup is that the tapes are much slower than disks when you save the information or recover it. But that's OK for backups because you won't be searching through these tapes often. You hope you never have to get information back off them at all.

Look to models that use QIC, or quarter-inch cartridge tape cassettes (the tape inside is a quarter-inch wide). It has been the dominant tape-drive standard for a decade or more. New versions keep getting introduced with greater capacity either because the tape is longer - such as the move from QIC-40 (120 MB) to QIC-80 (250 MB) - or wider, as with the newer QIC-Wide format.

There's another new standard, called Travan, that's gaining quickly. It looks like it'll be the most widely accepted standard before much longer.

Software compatibility

The software used by tape drives hasn't been so standard, unfortunately, so you often haven't been sure that a tape saved on your drive would be readable on any other company's drive. Still, there is some backward-compatibility, so new generations of drives can read many of yesterday's tapes. And the drives and tapes are widely available and inexpensive.

Internal drives fit into standard drive bays, where you might otherwise put a floppy drive, a hard drive or a CD-ROM drive. They connect to the floppy disk controller and move information at floppy speeds: slowly.

External drives cost more - add about $150 - but they connect to the parallel port. That makes them a lot easier to install than internal tape drives and allows you to use them on more than one computer.

Formatting a tape can take an hour. Some people decide to spend more per blank tape to buy preformatted tapes.

QIC has been a standard, but Travan puts more data on a cartridge, up to 1,600 megabytes on one $26 blank tape. It can read the older QIC-40 and QIC-80 tapes, though sometimes only with special software that the drive companies don't include free.

Don't worry much about backup speed. Do check the drive's reliability by restoring a backup to an empty part of your hard disk and then checking to see if the files were restored properly. It's not much help to run a backup and then find, just when you really need to recover lost data, that the backup or restoring function failed. Also make sure you can buy blank tapes from multiple sources and cheaply. ----------------------------------------------------------------- A few of the better-known tape drives on the market:

Name: T1000, T1000e. (Hewlett-Packard Co., Colorado Memory Systems Division. 800-845-7905). Standard/capacity/price: 400 MB internal Travan drive (800 MB compressed), $218; external Travan, $255. Cartridge price: $30 . Backup software: Includes Windows, Windows 95 and DOS. Reads: QIC-40 tapes; reads and writes to QIC-80 tapes. Other: Company makes drives with other capacities in internal and external versions.. . Name: The TapeStor. (Conner Peripherals. 800-626-6637). Standard/capacity/price: 420 MB internal QIC-WIDE, $139; 800 MB internal Travan, $149; 800 MB external, $299. Cartridge price: $20 (420 MB) $30 (800 MB). Software: Runs under DOS or Windows 3.1?. Reads: QIC-80 tapes. . Name: Ditto Easy 800 . (Iomega. 800-697-8833). Standard/capacity/price: Travan drive: 420 MB internal, $100; 800 MB internal or external, $150; 3.2 GB internal, $320, external, $430. Cartridge price: $20 (420 MB), $30 (800 MB), $35 (3.2 GB). Backup software: All come with DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 software. Reads: (and writes on) QIC-80 tapes.. . Name: Backpack 800TD. (Micro Solutions. 800-890-7227). Standard/capacity/price: 400 MB Travan drive (800 MB compressed), $169. Cartridge cost: ?. Backup software: Includes Windows and DOS software; Windows 95 compatible.. Reads: QIC-40; reads and writes to QIC-80 and Travan TR-1 tapes. Other: Portable; uses parallel port but has "pass-through" so you can still hook up any other parallel device, such as a printer. . Pereos . (Datasonix, . 800-328-2779). Standard/capacity/price: External mobile storage device, 1 GB (compressed), $499. Cartridge price: $29. Backup software: Datasonix (works with Windows, Windows 95 and DOS). Reads: 2 1/2 mm metal-evaporated tape (from Datasonix) . Other: Super-portable (weighs only 10 ounces); plugs into any parallel port; cartridges size of postage stamp.

-- Phillip Robinson, Karen Kerchelich. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Tips for buying a tape drive

Back up your data. Period. A tape drive is the cheapest way to save lots of data conveniently. If you decide to get a tape drive:

-- Look for one that's inexpensive ($200 to $400) with cheap tape cartridges ($20 to $30 each) that can hold 500 MB to 1,000 MB.

-- If you're buying a new computer, ask for a built-in drive.

-- If you're adding to a computer, consider a drive that connects to the parallel port.

-- Look for a drive that uses a standard, such as the older QIC or the newer Travan. That lets you read and write tapes on a variety of drives.

-- Remember that standards aren't set in stone, and tapes and drives don't always mix and match, so just make sure you get a drive from a company you trust, with lots of blank tapes widely available at a low cost.

-- Standard-meeting drives to consider include Conner Peripherals' TapeStor, Colorado Memory Systems' T1000 and Iomega's Ditto Easy 800.

-- Solid parallel-port units include the Micro Solutions Backpack 900 and the tiny (but very non-standard) Pereos from Datasonix.

-- Use your drive religiously. - Philip Robinson. Knight-Ridder Newspapers.