| Price per License * | | $79.99 |
* In order to ensure a successful implementation and customer experience, Acronis Maintenance and Priority Support (AMPS) is required for the first year.Kansas City Star June 25, 2006
by David Hayes
Go Forth and Back Up
Mike Scott says he feels like he lost a good part of his life last month. The Kansas City man and his family lost hundreds of songs, "maybe thousands" of family photos, stories his daughter wrote years ago, some financial records and one home video. It happened in a matter of seconds. Lightning zapped his home's electrical system and fried the Scotts' computer. "It's all gone," Scott said. "What can I do?" The answer, unfortunately, is not much. While there are companies that specialize in prying information from damaged hard drives, the services are expensive and rarely recover all lost information, But it's a lesson for the rest of us. According to Harris Interactive polls completed for Symantec and Maxtor, almost half of us never hack up our hard drives. More than three-quarters don't do it often enough. I'm among them. Let's face it, backing up your computer hard drive sounds difficult (it's not) and takes time we don't always have (it doesn't have to). And, like others, I assume the worst will never happen (eventually it will). There's a lot at risk. More than 96 billion photos are stored on PC hard drives in U.S. consumer homes, according: to the research firm IDC. Although numbers aren't available for music tiles, it's undoubtedly even larger. Developing a system for backing up a computer can cost anywhere from a few cents to hundreds of dollars. A fairly full-featured software-hardware combination that does most of the work itself shouldn't cost more than $150. Considering that another research firm projects that an average computer has about $1200 worth of software and entertainment on it, that could seem like a bargain. What can cause a crash? Lots of things — the hard drive simply can fail, a power outage can cause a surge and zap a drive, a computer virus or worm can destroy data, a stolen laptop or home computer can disappear with your data. The list goes on. There are several ways to back up your computer's hard drive, but generally it requires software and some place to put the data you're backing up — a CD, DVD, separate internal hard drive or external hard drive. Both Microsoft Windows XP software and Apple's .mac service offer backup systems. Microsoft's, which generally must be installed from the Windows CD, is... well, let's just say there are far better alternatives. Apple's Backup 3, on the other hand, is easy but requires a $100-a-year subscription to .mac. There are dozens of alternative software systems out there. Some let you specify which files you want to back up. Among the least expensive is Karen's Replicator, with free backup software available at www.karenware.com. Among the best of the commercial software is Acronis True Image 9.1. A free trial version of the $50 full-featured backup suite can be downloaded at www.acronis.com. To reach David Hayes, call (816) 234-4904 or send e-mail to dhayes@kcstar.com.
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