Many users do not think about possible data losses. So-called maximum credible accidents do not happen frequently. A stroke of lightning, overheating or a simple head crash can destroy the data on your hard drive thoroughly. The dissertation, a business plan or a huge data base will be wiped off in an instance.

Some companies specialize in restoring and reconstruction of data on physically damaged drives. However, nobody will be able to guarantee you the success of such a restoration. In addition you can expect to pay tremendous prices for data restoration.

A data loss not only means a lot of trouble but can easily cause financial losses. Many companies would be absolutely paralyzed without their customer data base. A web designer would not be able to complete jobs without his templates, and hardware editors would have to repeat all tests in order to regain the results. Thus it's quite important to spend some time for data backups now and again. You should primarily concentrate on your address book, emails, downloaded data and programs, last edited files or new files (documents, graphics, sound files) as well as save games and configuration data.

Castlewood sent us their ORB drive, which is available either as an internal IDE or SCSI version or as an external USB or SCSI drive. With a capacity of 2.2 GB it is perfectly suited for backups and in order to make large amounts of data mobile. The IDE model at $ 149.95 is not that expensive. Both external versions are priced at $ 179.95 (USB) or $ 199.95, which is still acceptable. Also the media are sold at quite attractive prices ($ 19.95). That's what you have to pay for two 250 MB ZIP discs.