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Any computer guru will tell you that it's not IF your hard drive will fail but rather it's WHEN your hard drive will fail. And in preparation for that moment, you should backup your hard drive. A few short years ago, affordable hard drive capacities maxed out in the megabyte range. Most of us were reluctant to backup because floppy disk capacities were too small and tape drives were expensive and too slow. It's slow because a tape cassette is serial in design and must wind or rewind to access the location of any data on the tape. Then the larger capacity disks such as Iomega's Zip and Jaz drives appeared and tape for the most part fell completely out of favor.

But tape is coming back. Today's affordable hard disk drives now come in the multi-gigabyte range yet the aforementioned larger capacity disks haven't gotten much bigger. Zips are now up to 250 megabytes, Jaz and Orbs are about two gigabytes. But they just aren't big enough for those hard drives that start at 3 gigabytes and go up to 20 gigabytes and beyond. Trying to use Zips to backup a multi-gigabyte drive reminisces of using floppies to back up the older hard drives. And considering that one of the newer single tape cassettes can hold up to 66 gigabytes, tape is looking better and better.

The VXA-1 from Ecrix is a high speed tape drive that connects to your PC or Macintosh via a SCSI connection and is able to transfer data up to six megabytes per second. Another feature of the VXA-1 drive is reliability. According to Ecrix, built-in hardware sends the data in packets and does a complete check of the data to insure that the duplication is 100 percent accurate. Compression that doubles the capacities of the cassettes is done via the drive's hardware taking any computational load away from your computer and makes the drive's operation even quicker.

Another desired quality of the VXA tapes is durability. To demonstrate how reliable their cassettes are, Ecrix first boiled a tape for several minutes. After drying, the data remained in perfect condition. The next test dunked the tape in water and then it was frozen for several days. Upon thawing, the data was complete retrievable. In fact, the tapes actually operated better after freezing according to the company's president.

The VXA-1 is compatible with major backup applications and operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS. The drive comes with a three year warranty and free phone support for the warranty period. The internal drive retails for $899, the external version for $1049. Ecrix makes two tape cartridges capacities, 24 ($29.95) or 66 ($79.95) gigabytes. External models come in black, white and a Macintosh G4 charcoal.

Ecrix
www.ecrix.com

Scan it to the web.

OCR programs that scan typewritten documents into a word processor have been around for a long time. But scanning a document into a web site is something new. Caere Corporation, the makers of the popular OmniPage OCR application have come up with OmniPage Web. Billed as the first ever paper to Web OCR application, OmniPage Web lets you directly scan and convert a document into a working Web site page complete with all the proper HTML coding. Because it can identify the structure of the scanned document, it creates a complete outline of objects such as headings, body text, graphics, tables and links. You can change fonts and styles on the fly to further customize the page. If you create and design web sites, a tool such as OmniPage Web could save you untold hours of having to manually convert a printed document into a functioning web page.

Caere Corporation
www.caere.com
(800) 535-SCAN or (408) 395-4874