file that you haven’t backed up.
Many users continue to play Russian
roulette with their information and
digital creations, but you don’t have
to. These steps will help you develop a
backup regimen that suits your needs.
BACK UP A LITTLE OR A LOT
in windows xp and 2000, you need to
back up only your C:\Documents and Settings
folder (or whichever folder you’ve
set as your default). Forgo a grandiose
backup routine in favor of a plan that you
know you will perform regularly, or one
that’s easy to automate.
Make at least one extra copy of
all your business, tax, and other fi nancial
records; important text documents
and e-mail messages; and photos and
video you’ve transferred from your
digital cameras.
A complete system backup, such as a
disk image, will help you recover quickly
from a drive failure or other catastrophe,
but it adds the expense of a second
hard drive (or potentially extensive disc
swapping if you use your optical drive).
The best time to create a drive image is
immediately after you reinstall Windows
and get your applications running again.
An image containing a patched copy of
Windows and all your favorite programs
confi gured the way you want them is a
very useful thing to have at hand.
Nevertheless, you may be just fi ne with
backing up only your data fi les and folders.
Though it takes time, you can reinstall
operating systems and applications
from their original discs, and Windows
may even be better after you reload it.
PARTITION FOR SAFETY
by default, windows and most of
your applications dump the fi les you create
into your My Documents folder. My
Documents separates photos, music,
video, and other types of fi les and keeps
them all in one spot for easy copying, but
unfortunately it resides in the Windows
boot partition—the most vulnerable and
crowded place on your hard drive.
Creating a new partition for your data
makes backup easier and safer because
you avoid overwriting the files when
you reinstall Windows. Here’s one
possible approach: Use your C: drive
for your operating system; then create
a new partition (named your D: drive)
for your applications, another partition
(your E: drive) for your business and/or
fi nancial data, and yet another partition
(your F: drive) for image, sound, and
video fi les.
If you want to continue using the My
Documents folder as your primary fi le
repository, you can relocate the folder
outside your Windows partition: Open
Windows Explorer, right-click My Documents,
select Properties, and choose the
Move button under the Target tab; then
navigate to and select the folder outside
your Windows partition where you
want to relocate My Documents, and
click OK as often as necessary (See Figure
1). To change the folder where Outlook
Express stores your e-mail, open
the program, click Tools, Options, Maintenance,
Store Folder, Change, navigate
to the folder you want to keep your email
in, and click OK until all the dialog
boxes are closed.FIND THE RIGHT MEDIUM
the essential elements of backing
up are multiple copies and multiple
sites—the fi rst because any media can go
bad, and the second because you don’t
want to lose your backup along with your
PC. So back up to several sets of CDs,
DVDs, or other media, and let the size
of the job determine which media you
choose. For example, if your fi le is 2GB
and you want three separate copies, you
won’t fi t each copy on a single CD, and
they would take forever to upload to a
Web server; instead, use a DVD burner,
an external hard drive, or both. But if you
need to back up only 200MB of data and
you can live with two copies, the CD/
online route may be better.
For most people, DVD is the backup
medium of choice. Prices of recordable
DVD drives are coming down, and DVDs
store several times more data than CDs
do. Furthermore, writable DVD discs
are cheap and readily removable for safe
off-site storage. Using DVDs may entail
swapping discs a few times, so you’ll have
to hang around while backing up (at least
initially). For archiving unchanging data
that you’ll keep a long time, use DVD±R
write-once media.
If you’re looking for faster backups
that don’t require you to remain nearby
to swap discs, try an external hard drive
such as Western Digital’s Media Center
(See Figure 2) or Maxtor’s OneTouch.
Beware, however: A single hard drive is
far too fragile and unreliable for you to
count on it as your sole backup medium.
A handy small-scale backup tool is a
fl ash-based USB thumb drive. The drive
fi ts in your pocket and can safeguard small
amounts of vital data on the road. Just be
sure to encrypt that data to keep it from
prying eyes in case you lose the unit.
WINNING BACKUP STRATEGIES
the first backup you make is arguably
the most important because it serves
as the baseline for all subsequent
backups.
Run your backup software, and
select the partitions (for an image
backup) or fi les and folders (for a
fi le-level backup) that you want to
safeguard. Don’t overlook items
such as your e-mail, address
book, and calendar. If you aren’t
sure where these items—and
other program data—are stored,
open the relevant application
and look for fi le-storage settings
among its options.
Password-protect and encrypt
your data if you want it to
remain private. Give each backup
a descriptive name, such as
‘Backup of Rita’s first birthday
video 06 05 2005.bak’. Use the utility’s
comments feature to list the date and
time of the backup, and anything else
that will help you discern its contents in
the future. Save space by compressing
the backup, unless you plan to restore the
fi les using only Windows.
Use the backup application’s verify
function to confi rm that it copied all the
data correctly—enough things can go
wrong later without your starting off with
a bad backup. Make at least two copies.
Once you’ve made your full baseline
backup, you can drastically reduce your
time and space requirements by continuing
with either differential backups,
which include all data that has
changed since the baseline backup, or
incremental backups, which include
only data that has changed since the
last backup of any type. Incremental
backups are quick and require little
storage space, but re-creating fi les from
such backups involves restoring each of
these backups in order.
Would love to here from you...