Saving and Backing Up your Information

Sooner or later, guaranteed, you are going to have a system crash and lose information on your computer. Did Oh--I say guaranteed? I meant to say...guaranteed. Your lost data will range from just a few bookmarks or resume to a novel, graduate thesis, and/or work portfolios. For this reason, you need to back up your information regularly. If you don't, you're an idiot. Most people need to lose valuable information once or several times before they catch on. You will need to back up your computer anyway when you upgrade or get a new one.

The smartest, fastest, and cheapest way to back up your computer is to burn it to a CD. Ideally, you will do this every two weeks or so (depending on factors such as how often you use your computer, how well it's running, the value of the information on it and how many kids you have who like to take things apart). It's best to have two or three rewriteable CDs that you rotate in case one fails. You should keep a copy of one of these some place off-site in case of fire, etc.

Here are some other choices you have to back up information:

• Copying information onto a floppy or zip disk.
• Mirroring or copying a hard drive onto another one.
• Setting up the automatic RAID disk mirroring feature in Windows Advanced Server 2000.
• Emailing information to yourself (only good for small amounts of data).
  

As listed above, another method is mirroring a disk onto another one. This way, if one disk fails, you have a copy of the whole operating system as well, and not just data such as Word files or bookmarks. The problem with this is if a virus infects and corrupts the damage on one drive, the other drive will have the same problem. Also, any other system degradation, such as registry problems, may be affecting both drives. Finally, if both drives are in the same location (likely), fire or theft is an additional danger.

How to organize your information for easy backup

The My Documents folder on your Desktop can be used to save your own information such as Word documents, pictures, bookmarks etc. in one place that is easy to find if you want to just back that up onto a disk. Here are some things you should remember to back up:

• Bookmarks.
• Any pictures you want to keep.
• Any Word documents.
• Any old drivers or freeware/shareware programs that might not be available anymore (you did keep the original installation files, didn't you?).
• Any emails on your system.
• A list of software you have on your system that you like, so that you can set up a new system more quickly.
• Any addresses.
• Any websites or other projects you have created.
• The serial numbers to any software packages you might need so you can reinstall them again.
• A copy of your addresses from your online email account, (you could just go to the address page in Hotmail, for example, and print it out).