Sound familiar? I wish I had the proverbial nickel for every time I have lost data from a Windows crash, or hard drive failure. Tape backups have been popular in the past, but tend to be slow, and there are problems with the durability of the medium itself. Floppies are too small and cumbersome to be considered. With the lower cost of hard drives, they are becoming popular as a means of backups, but they too have some durability concerns. My personal choice for long term durability has been the MO (Magneto Optical) disk. They are great on durability, but are somewhat expensive. An alternative to the MO is the CD that is now common, thanks to reasonable prices for the CD burners. 

Durability of storage medium has long been a source of concern and debate. When Sony released the Betamax, I understand they wanted to advertise a storage life of approximately twenty years, but the legal watchdogs said nope. Since this type of video was relatively new, no one knew how long the data would survive. The general “rumor” became about five to ten years. As an aside, I recently found a tape I made of a football game in 1979, and it looked the same as when I recorded it. The storage life is now not the main issue, but rather convenience of use, and whether or not there will be some means of retrieving the data some years down the road. The medium may still be good, but will the device used to record it still be around? CD’s appear to be the basic medium of choice now, and likely will be for some time. Many people now have a CD burner they added to their machine, or had one included in a new computer.

NTI makes a product called Backup NOW which is maybe the best current solution for backing up data, both from a cost as well as an ease of use standpoint. The cost part is low even if you do not have a CD-RW, as you can purchase one for well under one hundred dollars for a fast unit. The cost of a blank CD-R is as low as twenty cents. Office Depot recently had a spindle of one hundred disks for $19.99. As each disk holds up to 700MB of data, that equates to $.000285571 per MB! I have been using another NTI product, NTICD, which is used to record CD’s. I like that product, and when I saw this, I decided to check it out. Since most people are familiar with recording CD’s , I won’t spend time on the recording part. 

You can backup just files that you select individually. If you want, a complete backup of your hard drive can be easily done, as it spans multiple disks for large amounts of data. If you are connected to a network, you can backup network drives mapped to your computer. The usual utilities are included, and a nice one is the scheduler for unattended backups. Data compression, just as most tape backups, is included. You can store as much as 1GB on a single 650MB disk. 

While I won’t go into detail on burning a CD, I will pass on a couple of thing I have run into. The most basic is turn off all unnecessary TSR items running before you make a disk. Applications like anti-virus apps can create a coaster in a heartbeat. Be sure to turn off screen savers too. Anything that needs to access the drive during a burn can cause trouble. Something else I found is sometimes the disk is not “closed”. You can only write one time to a CD-R, and you have the option of closing a “session”, or the disk. If you close both, the disk is no longer writable. I have found many disks that were reported as bad, or “coasters” to merely be in an “open” state. If you go back into the disk, and set your Cd software to “close” the disk, it is usually a good disk after all. I wish I had known this before I tossed all those “coasters” out. Oh well! The included manual is a pretty good one, and will answer most questions.

I like this product, and think it worth a try by anyone wanting a cost effective means of backing up their data. I did not find it locally, but NTI products are generally available at most software stores. You can buy it direct and currently it is fifty dollars off at $49.99 plus S+H.