Computer Basics

So, think "it" won't happen to you? Won't ever have a hard drive crash? Never a power surge? Viruses can't get to you? What about a fire...or theft...a storm? There are any number of things that could happen to cause your data to be lost...

The customer who called me this morning and said they'd had an electrical outage and the server wouldn't boot didn't think it would ever happen to him, either. First question I had was where is your backups? He said the CDs are in the vault but we haven't done a backup in about 6 months!! My next question was why not? Dave said, sheepishly, we keep forgetting. After examining the system we discovered the drive was toast and had to be replaced...and about 6 months of work for a very busy business was gone.

Don't delay, do a backup today...and then resolve to back up your data on a continuing basis. Most people decide to do a backup only after they've lost data or had a hardware failure.

Try to find a backup package that will hold about twice as much of your hard drive so that you're able to schedule backups to be done when you don't want to use the PC.

I've been trying out a little application that mirrors my local drive constantly and should I lose the boot drive I can simply boot from the drive that was mirrored. I'll have more on that in another article soon but to date, after about 3 months of testing, it has worked flawlessly.

Backup only what is needed. If you're not sure, back it up and be better safe than sorry. While you may think you need to backup everything you don't need to. Don't backup software or applications that you have the installation disks for. Backup your important data like Word or Excel files or family and other important pictures or documents.

There are countless numbers of programs that perform data backups for you. Windows XP comes with backup software but you may want something more tailored to your needs.

What media you use for backups is important, too. You may only need a few files so backing up to a diskette may work. On the other hand if you have tons of files that you must keep track of tape is still the ace of backups. In between those 2 extremes are backups that write to CDs, programs that write to thumb drives and every other variation you can imagine. It really doesn't matter how you do the backup...just, please, do it. I really don't like telling people they've lost all of their hard work when there are simple, easy to use backup solutions available.