Computer Crisis!

What to do when your hard drive is destroyed or your laptop is stolen

Mike Bittel, a financial and business development consultant in Florida, moves between client sites frequently. "A few months ago, my computer crashed.

Windows would no longer load. I called support at the manufacturer and they told me that I was going to have to re-install everything and if I had any data files on the laptop, they would be lost. Even after spending two hours on the phone with Microsoft, they told me the same thing."

Luckily, Bittel was prepared for this type of disaster. He had stored all of his data at the Filing Room and had no problem re-installing everything. "I was up and running in hours. If I had not stored my files on the Filing Room site, I could have been out of business."

While storage Web sites are a good resource, experts have differing views on these services. Dan Tanner, the director of storage and management at the Aberdeen Group, isn't sold on Web sites that offer disk storage space. "It requires high-speed access and persistence," he notes. "If you're stuck using a dial-up modem and your files are large, it becomes a problem..."

... Another fan of the software approach to disaster recovery is Cullin J. Wible of Algorim Technologies. "We began deploying Windows 2000 to a number of our clients and had evaluated several imaging solutions including Microsoft's RIZ and Powerquest's Deploycenter," Wible explains. "We found that RIZ required network cards and the setup was more complex then we wanted; Deploycenter was too expensive and extremely top-heavy."

Cullin did some research and chose Acronis True Image from Acronis. He hasn't regretted his decision. "We were upgrading many laptops and desktops and found that by imaging the machines first, we could perform upgrades without any risk of data loss," he says. "If an upgrade went totally wrong, we could easily restore the original image in about an hour. Now we have images of each user's PC so if anything ever happens, we can easily restore it to the way it was on the day we installed Windows 2000."

Instant Recovery and Acronis True Image are just a couple of software choices. Whether you're looking for protection for one laptop or several, one is sure to fit your needs...