Newbie Guides A Trouble Free PC Backing Up Your Files

Backing Up Your Files

Backing up your files simply means making a copy of them so that if the original is lost or damaged, you can use the copy. You can back up your hard drive to floppy disks, to a Zip disk, to a tape drive or CD-ROM and even another hard drive.

How often you back up depends on how valuable your time and data is. If you're working on an important file, save it to a floppy as well as to your hard disk. If you're running a home-based business, you should invest in a tape backup drive and backup on a daily basis.

Most users can get by with a less rigorous backup schedule. Back up the files in your data folders every week, and perform a complete system backup every few months. You can backup your data files simply by dragging their folders to the icon for your floppy disk. In Windows, you can use the Backup program in Programs/Accessories/System tools. This lets you check off the folders you want to back up.

High-capacity removable disks, such as those you use with the Iomega Zip Drive, are great for backing up a hard disk, and they can help keep down the clutter on your disk. Zip Drives come with their own backup software. A tape drive that can store from 400 MB to 2 GB of data is even better for backup, as it will keep media-swapping to a minimum. All tape drives also come with their own backup software.

Another useful device for backing up valuable data is a re-writable CD-ROM. (A CD-Writer is also useful but lacks the ability to overwrite existing files). At Scotsmist we use a Jumbo 8000 Tape Streamer for our full-backups and CD-ROM for backing up our day to day files. With modern CD-Writers you can burn a full CD in under 10 minutes. We have not yet found software suitable for spanning a full backup to multiple CDs.

Many of our customers like to do backups but do not have the facility to store a full backup as it would require several hundred floppy disks. What we suggest is this - use Windows Explorer or a DOS prompt and clear the archive attribute of all your files. This will trick the backup software into thinking that a full backup has been done. Once a file has changed, it's archive attribute will change. Thus when you run a backup, edited files will be marked as changed and therefore be included in a recursive backup.

Organising Your Files

Using Virus Protection