Backup options: pay now to save heartache later. (Office Technology).

The need for continuously reevaluating your backup protocols and strategy was discussed in a recent column. It really doesn't take much to completely nuke a PC and/or your network. Recreating files and data that are critical to the ongoing operation of your office, or perhaps the entire organization, can be a massive undertaking.

One big problem in performing backups is that it is time-consuming. This leads users to often shirk the whole thing. The answer is to break the backup process out into tasks that are realistic. For example, use a portable hard disk drive on a nightly basis to perform an incremental backup, and a high-capacity medium, such as DVD recordable, on a less frequent basis, perhaps weekly, to perform a complete backup.

In choosing a portable hard disk drive, make sure that you select one with enough capacity to hold the information that you need to back up. One approach that works well for a lot of offices is to purchase a case and interface, and put your own hard drive into it. The rationale behind doing it this way, rather than just purchasing a complete portable drive unit, is that with hard drive prices falling every few months, it's easy to upgrade the portable backup drive fairly often. This not only gives you increasing capacity at very reasonable prices, but also goes a ways to protect your office against failure of the hard drive being used for backup.

There are a number of empty case/inter face boxes available. One that's pretty good is from ADS Technologies (www.adstech.com). Its PYRO models. are available with USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394 Firewire interfaces for about $130. The USB 2.0 model can be used with the faster USB interface, and is also backwards compatible with the USB 1.1 interface found in most of the current crop of PCs. Remember, that price is without the hard disk drive. Any standard IDE internal hard disk drive will work with this case. You can get an 80GB Maxtor, Western Digital or Seagate for about another $100 or so. Installing the drive into the case shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. The first time that you use it, your operating system may want to format the hard disk, so allow an extra half-hour for the first backup.

Install a copy of a good backup program on each of the PCs you want to protect. One program that is easy to use, yet still has excellent features, is Backup Now! Deluxe 3.0, from Newtech Infosystems, Inc. (NTI) (www.ntius.com). At $79, it's not prohibitively priced, and you can even download the software over the Net if you don't feel like going to a computer or office supply store.

If you have more time to perform your backups, or to perform full backups of the hard disk drive, one of the new DVD burners is a good idea. Most of them can use both write-once and rewriteable media. Rewriteable discs are more expensive, but you can use them over and over. The downside of a rewriteable is that the recording speed is much slower than that of a writeonce disc. Both types of discs hold up to 4.7GB of files, and as long as you don't leave these discs out in the sun, or on top of a radiator, the data should last for many years.

There are several competing formats being used in DVD burners. Pioneer was the first vendor out of the gate, and offers the DVD-RW/-R format. Most of the available drives other than Pioneer use the DVD+RW/+R format. Also available are drives from Panasonic and Toshiba, which use the DVD-RAM format. Each format has its plus and minuses.

Since DVD+RW and DVD+R media is a bit easier to find, it's recommended that you go with a drive that uses that format.

There are a couple of approaches you can take to backing up with a DVD burner. One is to use a portable drive that you can move from PC to PC. This has the advantage of portability, but is limited by the data transfer rate of the interface available in the PCs being backed up.

Iomagic, Inc. (www.iomagic.com) makes a good portable DVD+RW/+R drive. At just less than $400, it's almost twice as expensive as a portable CDRW drive, but the DVD+RW or writeonce DVD+R discs it can burn each hold up to 4.7GB of backup files. A fast USB 2.0 interface on the drive is backwards compatible with USB 1.1, and the drive comes with Nero Express software for burning CD-RW, CD-R, or DVD discs. You do, however, need to have a USB 2.0 interface in your PC to burn DVDs. We've got one of these drives in our office, and it works great.

You can also install an internal DVD burner in one or more of your PCs. This is a very viable approach if your office is networked, since you can perform an incremental backup of individual PCs to a network server, then backup the server to DVD, or, for that matter, to a large portable hard disk.

If you decide to go this route, most of the name-brand DVD burners are pretty good. There have been good results with the HP dvd200I and the Philips DVDRW228 drive.

If there's a little more money in the budget, though, the best drive recommended right now is Sony's DRU-500A. This is the first extended multi-format DVD burner on the market. While prices in this market are changing rapidly, the drive is priced, at the time this is written, at just slightly more than $400. That's about $50-$75 more than standard DVD+RW/+R drives. For that extra money, you get enhanced media compatibility The DRU-500A can write on pretty much any DVD recordable media except DVD-RAM discs. That means that you can use DVD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+RW, and DVD+R media. Write now with competing media formats, this compatibility makes the DRU-500A a very safe choice. Sony has switched software vendors with this drive, and includes a suite of software from Veritas Software that's almost identical to the one that comes with the popular Hewlett Packard dvd200i drive.

These aren't the only choices in backup devices and techniques. Make sure that you reexamine and update your backup protocols. It's important, even if you aren't a giant organization.

Ted Needleman is the former associate publisher and editor-in-chief of Accounting Technology magazine, lie is now a technology consultant and writer based in Stony Point, NY His email address is [e-mail]