Archive Corp. to Offer New Data Backup Device : Products: An executive said that the high-capacity range of the tape drives makes them ideal for protecting networks of personal computers.

COSTA MESA —  Archive Corp. said Wednesday that it plans to introduce by year’s end a new generation of data cartridge tape drives, which can back up data stored on a typical computer network three times over.

The company’s Archive Technology Inc. subsidiary in Costa Mesa held a press conference to display several new members of a family of high-capacity data cartridge tape drives that can store from 2.1 gigabytes to 4.2 gigabytes of data. A gigabyte is a thousand megabytes, which is equivalent to the data on about 1,000 floppy disks.

Fred Richardson, an Archive vice president, said the capacity range of the new drives makes them ideal for backing up networks of personal computers in corporate settings, workstations, minicomputer systems and high-end PCs.

A typical computer network with a high-end PC known as a file server can store about 640 megabytes worth of data. Archive’s new Anaconda drives will have the ability to store three times as much data, and with a technique called data compression, the capacity can increase sixfold to 4.2 gigabytes.

“This gives someone the ability to back up their data three times over, which is considered an optimum level for data security,” Richardson said.

The tape drives, which use magnetic tape cartridges produced by St. Paul-based Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Inc., Richardson said, will be able to store 10 gigabytes of data when the next generation of cartridges is introduced in 1993.

Ray Freeman, president of Freeman Associates Inc. in Santa Barbara, an industry consulting firm, said that level of storage would ensure that tape cartridges would remain a principal medium for backup storage for years to come.

Archive introduced the first member of the Anaconda family, a tape drive that stores 1.35 gigabytes, earlier this year.