No More Excuses!
by Gary Woods

Anyone who has ever written one of these types of columns or spoken on the Radio or Television about computers has told you that you need to backup your data. Well I think I've finally found a device that is so simple there can be no more excuses for you to do what you know you should.

Maxtor has come up with the second generation of its OneTouch backup drive appropriately called OneTouch II. A large, illuminated button initiates backups, or you can redefine the button to launch a program of your choosing. You can choose the time and frequency of backups and select specific folders or the entire drive. The comprehensive backup option is intended to run unattended daily after work hours and it creates restoration points so you can revert to a known configuration or restore data as of a given day.

The files in the restoration dataset are automatically compressed and are not individually accessible or readable by Microsoft Windows. But, the Retrospect software that comes with OneTouch II lets you select the entire backup, a folder, or an individual file, which can be restored to the original location or to a new one.

Retrospect automatically prunes old incremental backups as you add new ones, but you can freeze given dates to preserve important month-end, year-end or project-oriented snapshots.

The 250GB version of OneTouch goes for $299 and the 300GB version goes for $349.95 direct from Maxtor www.maxtor.com.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910