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Backup Strategies
One of the most neglected aspects of PC maintenance is backing up user data files. People often don’t think about backing up important digital files until after they’ve experienced a hard drive failure. If you have stuff saved on your computer that you would really regret losing if the hard drive broke (word processing documents, digital photos, etc), you need to consider adopting a backup strategy.
Locating and Determining the Digital Size of Data Files
The first task when developing a backup strategy is identifying and locating files to back up. With Windows 98, ME and XP computers, most modern software uses “My Documents” or one of its sub-folders as a default saving location, which makes backing stuff up a one-stop-shop affair. Vista users can find all their subfolders with data files by clicking on the Start button and then their user login name at the upper-right corner of the Start menu. Older versions of common programs and some more specialized software, however, have their own proprietary saving locations. To be sure of where your software is saving data files, open the program, go to the File menu, and click on “Save As”. The “Save In” location will be listed at the top of the “Save As” dialog box. By clicking on the downward-pointing arrow next to that field, you can then make note of the directory path to your data files and folders. Once you have found your files, the easy way to determine how big any file is in digital size is to right-click on it and then select “Properties”. To get the total size of everything in you’re My Documents folder, click on “Select All” under the Edit menu and then click on “Properties” under the File menu.
Finding Email Mailboxes and Address Books
Unfortunately, finding email mailboxes and address books for the purpose of backing them up can be more complex if you are using Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or some other email management program. Finding this kind of data on your hard drive requires some specialized knowledge or relying on automated backup software. If you use some web-based email, like Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo, you don’t usually have to worry about it because your email is saved on their mail servers, and you are only viewing a web page copy of your email when you log into it and never really download it to your hard drive.
Choosing the Right Backup Device
Armed with an understanding of the digital size of stuff to back up, the next step is to select a backup device. Floppy drives are considered obsolete because they are very small (1.5 MB) and fragile. Burning files to CD’s can be a cost-effective alternative, but still relatively limited in capacity (700 MB) and necessitating a fair amount of user time and attention to manage the burn project correctly. USB flash drives are a very cost-effective and reliable alternative (8 to 16 GB models can be found for $20 to $40 these days), and are small enough to allow for easy file portability. If you have a lot of stuff to back up, an external hard drive that connects using a USB, firewire or network cable is the best way to go. While more expensive and bulkier than flash drives, external hard drives are huge (500 GB models being very common), fast and reliable.
Simple Manual Backup of My Documents
If all your stuff is in My Documents and one of its subfolders, a simple manual backup involves just a few basic steps:
· Open the My Documents window, restore it down in size and move it to one side of the screen.
· Open the window showing the contents of your external drive, restore it down and move it to the other side (so that you can see the contents of both).
· Create a new folder in the external drive window from the File menu and name it Backup (or something similar) with the date.
· Double-click on your new backup folder to open it.
· In the “My Documents” window, click on the Edit menu and “Select All”, then click on the Edit menu again and “Copy”.
· In the external drive’s Backup window (the destination), click on the Edit menu and “Paste”.
Automated Backup Software
If the prospect of managing your own backups seems daunting, there are several good software choices that can automate the process for you. A good backup management program will accurately find all the stuff that needs to get backed up, schedule your backup jobs for a frequency and time of your choosing, and even let you determine how many backup jobs pile up on your external drive before deleting the oldest ones. Highly rated backup management software from Genie-Soft, Acronis, and New Tech Infosystems can be purchased and downloaded online and, if configured correctly, can take over responsibility of this very important PC maintenance routine.