But CD-Rs are not without their problems.
Because data is burnt rather than stamped into
the recording layer, apparently indestructible
CDs can deteriorate fairly rapidly and even the
best are rarely guaranteed for more than 10
years.
In addition, the 650-700MB limit of CDs
makes them unsuitable for backing up today’s
multi-gigabyte hard drives. Writable DVDs are
becoming more popular, but backup is one area
where tape comes into its own. Tape can, in the
right conditions, have a shelf life of up to 30
years. Though slow, drives such as the
Seagate TapeStor (www.seagate.com) or
HP Surestorecan (www.hp.com/uk)
accommodate up to 40GB of data – more than
enough room for a complete backup.
Increasingly popular, however, are drive
alternatives: fixed or removable, internal or
external. At its cheapest, this can be no more
than a second hard drive - copy your data from
C to D and you will have one of the fastest and
most reliable backup options on the market. If
anything happens to the first disk, you can
simply switch to the alternative.
External drives are another option. Iomega,
famous for its Zip Disk has recently released
the Peerless cartridge drive with capacities of
10-20GB (www.iomega.com).
Firewire or USB drives are even better priced
alternatives, offering capacities of anything up
to 160GB. Like the Peerless system, external
drives also have the advantage that they and
your data can easily be taken off site.
Crash team
True hard drive crashes, where the drive
mechanism fails – for example, when the read/
write head collides with a platter – are
fortunately very rare, but there are plenty of
other reasons why you may not be able to
access your data. A virus, for example, could
delete files or, more seriously, wipe essential
Bios data; alternatively, a poorly configured
machine could go down, corrupting
information that points to the files on your disk.
Such events need not be entirely catastrophic,
but you do need to prepare for them in advance.
First and foremost, you need to prepare a
recovery disk. This consists of a set of stripped-
down MS-DOS drivers that enable you to boot
your PC from the A drive. You can create such
disks in Windows 9x and Me via the Recovery
Disk tab in Add/Remove Programs, or by
booting from your Windows XP CD and using
the Recovery Console by typing D:/i386/
winnt32.exe /cmdcons, where D is the letter of
your CD drive.
A startup disk or Recovery Console provides
a few basic command tools to diagnose and
repair your system. Typing Chkdsk /f, for
example, checks the status of a disk and can
repair some errors, while Fixboot writes a new
partition boot sector to your disk and Expand
extracts a file – useful if you need to replace a
device driver, for example, from your Windows
disk. These are powerful tools, but also
difficult to use, and it is no surprise that a
number of simpler safety net utilities have
developed, such as Ontrack’s Fix-It Utilities
(also available as part of SystemSuite 4.0):
www.ontrack.co.uk/datarecovery
McAfee Utilities 4.0:
www.mcafee.com
and Norton Utilities 2003 (included in
Symantec’s SystemWorks 2003)
www.symantec.co.uk.
These programs all work in a similar fashion,
and include most of the tools you will ever
need to protect and optimise your PC –
SystemWorks and SystemSuite in particular –
including antivirus and even firewall protection
as well as diagnostics and repair tools.
If you have SystemWorks or SystemSuite
installed, each program offers a one-stop
solution for beginners that will analyze and fix
most faults on a system. If you require a more
detailed repair, both also offer expert tools,
such as Norton Disk Doctor and
PCDiagnostics, and DiskFixer as part of
SystemSuite.
Continued on page 13
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