Personal backup options

When hard drives go bad, losing research data, documents and email can be catastrophic.

Because data recovery shops like Ontrack and DriveSavers can charge from $1500 to $10000 to recover information from "dead" or damaged hard drives, we strongly recommend that you spend some time and money to back up your data on a periodic basis.

If you are not a faculty member, we recommend the Maxtor One Touch III product, pictured to the right. This is available for both Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP. Pricing of various capacities of hard drives can be obtained through Froogle.

This product places a single button on a Firewire/USB external hard drive. After software is installed and configured, pressing the button triggers an immediate backup with the Retrospect Personal software (included in the product). You can also set periodic backups at a schedule convenient and desirable for you.

If you are a faculty member, we recommend that you subscribe to the Department Backup Service.