Last week, I told you about some computer problems that I had and how best to deal with a crisis when it occurs. I promised that I would discuss backups with you this week. Coincidentally, I just revised my whole backup procedure this week. I think it is just about airtight. I do not expect you to do as complicated a backup as I have set up, unless you are truly a computer geek like me.
Unless you keep nothing on your computer that you don't want to lose, you need to have some form of backup system established. There are different levels that you can use to do this. First and foremost is your personal data, such as financial data, material you have written and saved, genealogical data, e-mail, pictures, etc. The first thing you must consider is the media upon which you want to save your data.
In the old days, we saved it on floppy disks. The problem with floppies is that they don't hold very much data. They all hold 1.4 Megabytes, which is less than the size of some pictures that you might want to save. You can use floppies to save a very few small files from your computer. Simply copy those files to the floppy disk, using either drag and drop, or copy and paste. You can find out how to do these from my computer lessons if you don't know how to do either of those.
If you have a CD burner, you can back up your files on a CD-RW, that is a rewritable CD. A CD will hold about 640 Megabytes of data. You can either use a program to burn CD's, or use the CD-burning software that comes with Windows XP. Again, you can simply copy the files you want to backup onto the CD. If you have a DVD burner, I would suggest that you use a rewritable DVD for backup. A DVD will hold 4700 Megabytes (4.7 Gigabytes)
If you have a second physical hard drive in your computer, you can backup your files into a folder on that hard drive. This is the fastest way of backing up your system. Be sure it is a separate physical drive. If you simply use another logical drive on the same physical drive as you have your data, you will not be protected in case of a hard drive failure.
An even better way is to have an external hard drive connected to your computer with USB or fire wire. Be sure that your USB ports are of version 2.0. The old version 1.1 is much too slow. That means you must also have a USB cable that is version 2.0, and of course your external hard drive must have a version 2.0 USB connection. Equipment purchased within the last two years will have that type of USB setup. Older computers will not. However, you can put a PCI card in an older computer that allows you to use USB 2.0. They cost about $15.00. External hard drives can be purchased for as little as $100.00 if you do a little shopping. Newegg.com is a good place to purchase that kind of thing. If you have a little computer proficiency, you can purchase a USB enclosure and install an internal hard drive to make your own external hard drive. That is a little cheaper. I would suggest that you have at least 80 Gigabytes of storage on your external hard drive. It doesn't cost much more to have several hundred Gigabytes.
Thus far, I have suggested doing the backup procedure by simply copying files from your system to the backup media. Next week, in the third and final part of this series, I will discuss how to use programs to do the backup and also how to do a full system backup. There are many ways of doing that sort of thing. You will feel a lot better if you back up your personal data. Programs can always be reinstalled. Your data can only be reinstalled if you have saved it somewhere.