Maxtor's OneTouch 4 Plus ($200 direct) is a full-featured backup and external storage drive with catastrophic-failure protection. A drive such as this is indispensable for a business owner or anyone who relies on or values what's stored on their computer, everything from business documents, digital pictures, downloaded music, and videos to letters to Grandma. (Last time I checked, that includes just about anyone who has a PC.) With 500GB of drive space, the OneTouch 4 Plus can back up a 160GB drive three times over and still probably have space for your most important files. It's not quite perfect yet, but it is a trustworthy choice for anyone who needs to back up a PC locally.

The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus resembles a semi-trapezoidal slab, with metal sides and black plastic all around. Its size and weight—2.5 by 6 by 6.75 inches (HWD), 2.5 pounds—are typical for a "fixed" external hard drive. Its only adornments are the now-familiar OneTouch button with integrated drive lights on the front, and the power and I/O ports in back. I prefer the design to that of the competing Seagate FreeAgent Pro, mainly because the FreeAgent Pro goes for form over function. The FreeAgent Pro's removable port modules are innovative, but ultimately less useful than originally intended. The OneTouch is simpler yet functional, and that's what really counts.

The "Plus" in OneTouch 4 Plus refers to a few added features over the plain old OneTouch 4. For one, the "basic" OneTouch 4 is all plastic, while the Plus adds metal to the case. The Plus also adds FireWire to the mix. (You have to upgrade to the Seagate FreeAgent Pro to get eSATA). And last but most important, the Plus comes with SafetyDrill, Maxtor's new "bare metal" catastrophic failure backup program. That is, the SafetyDrill backup will help you even if you totally torch your C: drive and it's no longer functional (but the rest of your PC is okay).

SafetyDrill helped the Plus's little brother, the OneTouch 4 Mini, gain its recent Editors' Choice. The program helps by backing up drive images of your C: drive onto the OneTouch 4 Plus, and with 500GB you should have enough room for at least a couple of images. The SafetyDrill images back up all the information on your drive, including the OS, documents, applications, and all those invisible files like boot records that help the PC work. SafetyDrill's one big drawback is that it works only on Windows XP and Vista, and then only on drives that are NTFS formatted. It won't work on Macs, or on drives that are FAT32 formatted. Fortunately, although you'll still find some FAT32-formatted drives on older XP machines or home-built Vista PCs, the majority of purchased Vista PCs already use NTFS.

The drive itself, a 7,200-rpm mechanism, is speedy. The OneTouch 4 Plus was able to back up our standard test folder in 51 seconds with USB, while taking a quick 48 seconds when I copied the folder using Windows Explorer. When I used the drive's FireWire 400 interface, the result was a bit slower, at 1 minute 15 seconds for the drag-and-drop test. This is still an acceptable score but also shows that direct-connect USB 2.0 (480-megabit-per-second theoretical maximum) can be faster than FireWire 400 (400 Mbps). An eSATA version of the same drive is likely to be even faster, but thus far you'll need to upgrade to one of Seagate's FreeAgent Pro drives for that interface.

The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus is a very good backup drive option. The SafetyDrill feature should be a godsend to business owners who need to keep backups of their hard drive around at all times. (Isn't that all business owners?) Since a lot of small business owners may still be using FAT32 drives (or Macs), I'd like to see Maxtor make SafetyDrill compatible with those drives. But if you're the owner of a recently opened business or a personal Windows system, run, don't walk, to your nearest big-box store and get yourself a OneTouch 4 Plus.

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