A second hard drive lets you keep an exact copy of your working hard drive with virtually no effort, especially if your system has a good hard disk controller. Promise Technology's $470 PCI-based FastTrak ATA Raid Controller hard disk controller (available from Agate Technology) will automatically replicate on your backup drive every change you make to your original hard drive, thus maintaining an exact, timely duplicate.

After FastTrak is installed, backups are completely automatic. You never have to raise a finger. However, instantly updating data can work against you, too. Any data corruption or human error -- such as accidentally deleting or overwriting an important file -- is instantly transferred to the backup drive.

One alternative to relying on the FastTrak is to use a second conventionally installed hard drive to back up your primary drive. This may require occasional manual data backup but, executed properly, this plan offers far more flexibility in recovering data and fixing intermittent software problems.

Windows 98 comes with a useful backup utility, functionally but unimaginatively called Backup; you can find it under Start-Programs-Accessories-System Tools-Backup. Backup can move all of your primary drive or selected parts of it to your second drive (see FIGURE 1). You can arrange for subsequent backups to copy only new or altered files -- a big time-saver if you want to back up your entire hard drive, Windows and all.