CompuServe Messages

First,don't buy an extra drive or two and think you have a good data backup system. You'll only have a partial protection backup system. You will have protected yourself from the failure of one hard disk and you may have protected yourself from most program and user errors, but not all of them. You'll have covered most of the bases but left yourself wide open on the rest. You'll have no protection from fire, theft, floods and similar such total system failures. A big power surge could blast the hard disks along with the computer. Also if your computers power supply blowes up it can easily take out the hard disks to. You'll also have to be very carefull doing backups and restores because you'll only have one (two?) backups. Remember that hard disks don't come with write protect tabs. Also when you end up wanting more disk space you'll need to stay at double the disk capacity or buy some sort of backup system then. You can get an IBM PC only tape drive cheaper because the interface to a floppy controller is a bit simpler. But mostly because they can sell zillions more tape drives to IBM PC folks compared to the market for SCSI tape drives. So it comes down to being mostly an economy of scale issue.