New Products Make Backing Up Easier

Jon Pepper

Most PC users look forward to backing up their files about as much as they look forward to a visit to the dentist. They know they have to do it, but they would prefer not to. A new round of products seeks to make the system-backup chore a little less painful.

With its Zip drive, Iomega (801-778-1000; http://www.iomega.com ) made backup peripherals, if not the process itself, fashionable. With 100-MB data cartridges, a cool design, and the right price (under $200), the Zip became a best seller, with a claimed installed base of more than 2 milion units. Now, Iomega and others are evolving their backup products into devices that perform a multitude of operations, such as exchanging large data fil es, archiving, protecting hard drives from viruses, and many other functions. Iomega has followed its 1-GB Jaz drive ($499) with a new version of its tape-backup line, called the Ditto2GB, that offers an intuitive user interface, 2-GB storage capacity, and $149 drive price ($20 per additional tape).

Syquest (510-226-4000; http://www.syquest.com ; sales@syquest.com), known for its tape backup products, counters with its EZFlyer, a 3-1/2-inch 230-MB removable-cartridge hard drive ($299). The EZFlyer offers more storage than the Zip, but it's also more expensive. The media itself is inexpensive at $29.95. The EZFlyer is available in both parallel and SCSI version s.

Only about 5 percent of PC users currently have some type of backup or archive device, according to Jim Porter, president of Disk/Trends (Mountain View, CA), a market research firm. "It is too early to tell what technology will dominate, but I am inclined to think none will take over a very high percentage of the PC base," Porter says. "It is like life insurance: People don't need it until they are dead, and they feel the same about backup against failures." However, when the dark day comes that your hard drive fails, you will wish you were among the fashionable minority that uses a backup product.