I received an email from S. Smith recently and she said, “I bought an external hard drive for backing up my files.  I have finally gotten around to plugging it in and using it (much easier than I supposed).  Now I need to know which files to backup.”  She wondered about which programs, documents, folders, etc. to backup.

First off, with the prices of portable/external hard drives dropping so significantly you can’t afford not to get one if you need to backup data.  I just checked at TigerDirect.com and found a respectable 120GB external hard drive for $39.99.  That is really a deal.  I only have 100GB of storage on my home computer and that is made up of three separate drives; a 60GB, 25GB and a 15GB drive.

So the storage space is there and available.  Then the reader asked what files or programs should be backed up and the easiest way to do the backups.
 
Well for a simple backup you should select any files that you have created.  These would most likely be anything in your “My Documents” folder.  These would be files like your tax returns, letters you have written, communications for your scout troop, documents for your office and especially all of your family, vacation photos, etc.

All of your programs should have an installation CD(s) which you will use to reinstall the software whenever you need to in the future.  If you just backup your programs’ file folders they will not run when you restore them, or at least the larger more advanced programs won’t.  When a program is installed it creates files many places throughout your computer along with making edits to your computer’s registry.  If you don’t know what the registry is that’s OK as you probably shouldn’t be messing with it anyway, but it is important to making your computer and all software work. 

Now backups can be done by taking all of your files and compressing them into one large file.  I don’t care for that since if you need just one of the files it can be very complicated to retrieve it.  With so much storage space available today I just like to copy all of the files I need to save to another drive.

I have found an extremely good program made by Microsoft called, “SyncToy”.  It will walk you through the setup to back up exactly what files you need.  It can be downloaded for free from the MS website.  I started to type the URL here but it is over 100 characters long so just Google for it using, “Microsoft Synctoy” and it will be the first page that comes up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 5:27 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.