f you have a home computer, the chances are excellent that you don't back it up on a regular basis - and there is a good chance that you have never backed it up.
After all, backing up a home computer is hard work. Most PCs these days are sold with hard drives that store from 2 to 6 gigabytes. Saving this information to floppies is impractical - it would take thousands. Instead, many people use a tape drive, but they cost hundreds of dollars, and the tape cartridges typically cost $30 or more.
Alas, if you don't do regular backups, you are courting danger. Although computers are much more reliable than they were a few years ago, hard drives still fail. Then there are the constant risks of fire and theft. Backups also protect against data loss caused by viruses, clumsy fingers, and children who needed to clean off your financial records to make way for their computer games.
Connected Online Backup is an innovative system that lets you back up a huge hard drive without spending a huge fortune. The system uses your existing Internet connection and a few clever tricks to safely squirrel your data away at Connected's Backup Center. You can even schedule the backups to happen automatically - for example, every day at 3 a.m.
If you later discover a file is missing, you can run Connected's intuitive user interface, find the file in question, and restore it to your computer's hard drive. The service costs $19.95 a month for each computer you back up - a price that buys you an unlimited amount of storage space on the company's servers. Businesses can buy in bulk: For example, if you want to back up 100 computers, Connected charges $16.41 per month per machine.
Naturally, Connected works best if you have a high-speed Internet connection, such as a cable modem or a DSL line. Using my high-speed cable modem, I backed up a 1.5-gigabyte hard drive in a little less than two hours. (The same backup would have taken 15 to 30 hours over a dial-up connection.)
One of the tricks Connected uses to make the backup go faster is file comparison. When the program goes to back up your copy of Microsoft Word, for example, it first checks to see whether somebody else has backed up the files that make up the Word application to Connected's backup servers. If somebody has, the program doesn't bother uploading the same file a second time.
This generates huge savings for most users. After all, there is no reason to back up 10,000 identical copies of the same file from 10,000 individual computers, when one copy that is properly indexed and archived will work just as well.
Alas, Connected can't use this data-reduction trick when it is restoring the files to your computer after a crash. Restoring my hard drive over my high-speed cable modem took 12 hours - over a dial-up connection, it would have taken more than a hundred. Connected knows this is a problem.
So instead of downloading the files over the Internet, you can also have the company burn your files into a write-once CD-ROM and send the disks to you. The cost is $24.95, plus shipping.
My biggest concern when I first learned of Connected Online Backup was security: There are many secrets stored on my hard drive. What assurances did I have that the information would stay secure?
Connected's answer to the security problem is encryption. Before your files are sent over the Internet, they are scrambled using an encryption key that you specify. The files remain scrambled at Connected's data center. If you want to get your files back, you need to know the key you used. Connected's encryption protects against attackers on the Internet. The encryption also protects against the possibility of crooked employees at Connected.
But while Connected's encryption is good, it has problems. In my tests, I discovered that while the contents of the files sent over the Internet are encrypted, the file names are not. This is a serious failing, since file names frequently contain confidential information - for example, the names of clients. Somebody watching your Internet connection as your back up your computer can find out very quickly what you are working on.
The company dismissed my finding, saying the confidential information in file names isn't that significant. Perhaps so, but Connected is advertising its backup as providing ''absolute security.'' Connected is not delivering on this promise.
Another problem with Connected Online Backup is the restore process itself. Connected's disk ''repair'' software is quite sophisticated. If your computer stops working after you install a new program, you can use Connected to roll the computer back to the way it was. Alternatively, you can reformat your computer's hard drive (or buy a new one) and restore the backup from scratch.
Unfortunately, Connected makes the ''repair'' facility available only to businesses that use the service for at least 50 computers. ''Repair'' isn't made available to small businesses or individuals because Connected is worried about the cost of providing technical support to these users. But it is these small users that need services such as Connected's repair facility the most.
In coming years, remote backup systems including Connected are likely to be very popular. But Connected's current system needs to mature a bit before I can give it my wholehearted endorsement.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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