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Remember the good old days when you could stuff all your letters on a few floppy disks and that was your back up, sorted? Then along came tapes. Trouble is that hard disks very quickly outgrew tape drives.
My own system mushroomed so much that a full backup went onto ten tapes and took nearly 26 hours! Even more annoying is that over the years, my tape drive has chewed three tapes - an intensely undesirable phenomenon at the best of times.
Part of the value of a backup system is the peace of mind you get from knowing that if your hard disk grinds to a halt, or some twit decides to wipe a few 'unwanted' files from your PC, that you can recover lost data from a reliable backup source.
The other difficulty is backup software. It always seems so complicated. OK, I accept that for some businesses scheduled backups are a necessity. But often you just want to grab some files and copy them somewhere safe.
So I looked around for a relatively cost-effective alternative, and found it in the new Panasonic PD/CD phase change floptical drive. Deriving its name from floppy optical drive, these devices are a mixture of both technologies, and allow you to read and write data onto a walloping 650 MB re-writable disk.
Whilst you may use scheduling backup software with these drives if you wish, you can also use your standard Windows File Manager, Windows 95 Explorer, or even good ole' DOS to shuffle your files about. As an extra teaser, it also plays standard CD ROMs at quadruple speed.
I have tested one for about two months, and after giving it a resounding thrashing, the drive and all of the twenty or so disks I tried are still performing faultlessly. Formatting a disk takes a mere 20 seconds - unlike some back up tapes.
PD disks are remarkably robust. One survived over a fortnight rolling around in the back of my beaten up old Landrover - and having vacuumed out the dust, it played perfectly.
Relatively unaffected by stray magnetic fields, unlike conventional tapes or floppies, PD disks are recorded using a mixture of laser and magnetism. The disks are also physically small, for their capacity - about the size of a CD ROM caddie. Sounds great huh? So what's the down side?
You need a SCSI card in your computer. Pronounced 'scuzzy' and standing for small computer system interface, SCSI is a brilliant way of connecting peripheral devices such as hard disks, scanners and CD ROM to your PC.
Trouble is that a decent SCSI card will set you back anywhere between £80 and £200, depending on specification. The advantage of SCSI is that you can cascade up to six devices off one card - thus avoiding taking up loads of expansion slots in your computer.
The Panasonic drive itself will set you back about £500 and the disks are in the region of £40 each.
