Let's have a test. Pretend the next colleague or user who comes up to you says, "I thought I deleted everything in my C:\OldData directory, but I was in the C:\Data directory instead." How long before you get their files restored?

Need a worse scenario? How about, "My PC says there's no operating system." This happens sometimes when Windows (of all flavors) scrambles the boot loader section of the hard disk that starts everything. How long before you can recreate the entire computer system, including the operating system, applications and all the data files?

Statistics promise this type of meltdown will happen to about a third of you. Experience promises you'll spend at least a day getting everything back in working order-that's assuming you've got a good file back up system in place. But if your backups are old, or nonexistent, it may take weeks or longer to recreate the data. 

Enter Lockstep Systems' Backup for Workgroups. Aimed at small workgroups without a dedicated file server, the product uses hard disk storage to back up Windows PCs.  The advantages of hard disk backup include speed, easy restoration (no tapes to search through), and relatively low cost (around a dollar per hard disk gigabyte lately).

Backup for Workgroups leverages the peer-to-peer file server capabilities of networked PCs (running Windows 95 or later). One PC runs the Backup Server software and saves the backup files to a local or networked hard disk drive; the other PCs run Backup Client software. Backup for Workgroups uses file compression to minimize disk space usage, and the company claims 40 users can safely use an 80G-byte drive for backups. After all, 2G-bytes of unique data for each of 40 people is quite a bit.

One critical problem: How do you take backups offsite if they're stored to a PC hard disk? Tapes are easy to carry offsite, as are CD-ROM disks for those of you burning CDs for backups. Backing up a standard Windows PC requires more storage than a CD-ROM writer (about 650M bytes) or Zip disk (750M bytes), so a hard disk in a removable carriage is your best bet.

Backup for Workgroups also offers a mirrored disk-drive option that stores copies of your archived files on two separate hard disks (on the same or two different computers). Use removable hard disk drives for one of the back-up drives, and offsite storage becomes relatively simple. In my lab, I used a Linksys EFG80 network-attached storage (NAS) unit with an 80G-byte hard drive for the primary back-up disk. Then I configured the mirrored drive to replicate the back-up files on an Intel 20G-byte NAS system on the network. The Lockstep software automatically synchronized the two back-up locations, copying all files to the newly assigned mirrored drive.