Do you feel lucky? Well, do you? I ask because a recent backup vendor survey claims almost two-thirds of you backup less than once a month. The report also reveals that 2GB of data disappears every single minute due to drive failure, disaster or human error. Do you still feel lucky? Would you rather feel prepared? If so, say hello to the second generation of continuous data protection appliances from Lasso Logic, now subsumed by SonicWall.

I wrote about the first generation of Lasso Logic products more than a year ago, and told you I was impressed. Now part of SonicWall, Lasso Logic's products have been strengthened and upgraded. The products have also gone upmarket a bit, meaning they cost more. But there are now more than 10,000 SonicWall resellers able to help businesses backup reliably compared to the few hundred resellers hawking the previous product from start-up Lasso Logic.

Lasso Logic made appliances in small footprint desktop cases running a customized Windows operating system and SonicWall has now expanded the line to include serious business 1U and 2U rack-mount backup appliances now running Linux (you don't see the operating system, just the browser-based administration screens). Throughput is up, but so too is the noise level. All 1U servers make too much noise because they have to push air through a tiny fan, but the one I tested is the King of Noisy. If you don't have a server room or an enclosed rack cabinet, add that to the project cost or get one of the smaller units. Since SonicWall's target customer usually has 20 or more employees, this shouldn't be a problem for most of you.

SonicWall's installation routines always aggravate me, but there are two reasons why that won't bother you. First, I will almost certainly not be installing your appliance. Second, a trained SonicWall reseller or consultant probably will be. They can pull serial numbers off hardware and type them into online forms and go back and forth while you plan how to organize your backups and deploy the client software.

The only way to grab every file change on a computer is to actively monitor every file change on that computer. While small (between 6MB to 8MB on my test XP system depending on activity), the CDP software must be installed and configured. Clients choose their own folders to backup, but the administrator can add or delete folders for users and watch over the entire backup file pool using the enterprise management application. Since the files are stored on the appliance's hard disk, searching for a file across all the backups uses a single search field to find the file no matter which user's computer it came from, a chore that could drive you crazy with an old fashioned tape drive.

James Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area.