We all know we have to backup regularly, but those backups files can get huge. Add that to your existing your files and your notebook computer hard drive seems to have shrunk overnight. No matter what size hard drive you have on your notebook computer, space is a premium. Besides, it’s not exactly a good idea to store your backups on the same hard drive since you can’t retrieve it — rather defeats the purpose of backing up don’t you think? So what do you do, what are your options?

Backup to an external hard drive. This is probably the quickest, most cost effective option. You can often get a removable drive on sale or with rebate for a low price too. You can get one with hundreds of Gigabytes of space too. They can be easy to hookup to your notebook computer. However, do remember that they are hard drives and hard drives can fail. You may find the external backup fails before your notebook computer does.

Online backup. This is actually a good idea because physical disasters can happen to your home. And when that happens, you will always have a copy in a place not affected by the disaster. This is why businesses usually have one backup in the premises and one (or more) off premises. The good thing about online backup is, it’s accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. So if your notebook fails when you’re away from home, you can still retrieve your data.

Many of these services are reasonably priced and they provide you with everything you need to get the backups safely transfered. But because your data will be on someone else’s system, choose a reputable company, one who is not only established but takes customer data confidentiality very seriously.

Network attached storage. This would make more sense if you have several computers. They allow you to not only backup several computers’ data into one location but also ability to share or retrieve files from that central area. You can also achieve a similar effect equipping an older computer with a large hard drive and use it just for storage or backup.

Backup to CD or DVD. This is considered the safest for long term data integrity. External drives and network storage can still crash and prone to virusses. CD’s and DVD’s are also inexpensive. But backing up to disks daily is chore as you’ll find yourself having to manually pop in the disks. It becomes even more hard work when you have a lot of files and your backup spans several disks. The other problem with this method is, backup utilities that come with your operating system cannot backup to a CD or DVD drive. So you’ll have to fork out extra cash to buy a third party backup software that will.

No backup solution is one hundred percent and what you choose of course will depend on how you work. If your data is really important to you, try not rely on one backup source. Create two separate sources if you can afford to, just in case.

Lynn Chan helps new owners learn proper notebook care and use. Start taking care of your investment, with this free course 5 Days To A Healthier Notebook Computer http://www.notebook-computer-infocenter.com/5days-to-a-healthier-notebook.html

Backup on business computers is typically not the user’s concern unless it’s a small business. A business should have a policy in place for managing backups especially due to Sarbanes - Oxyley.

Four options for backing up:

Two options for what to back up:

Personally, I use an external hard drive (this is a 120 gig hard drive, they also have 20 gig, 40 gig, 60 gig, and 80 gig available. I suggest getting one that is 20 gigs bigger than your hard drive.). It saved me when my computer had to be reformatted a few months ago. Typically, the hard drive is supposed to be rebootable and load everything back exactly as it was before the crash.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. It worked out for the best because some of my system files were bad. The hard drive still had my data files and programs. First, I referred to my latest copy from Belarc Advisor. This is a free program that lists all the applications on your computer. Since I don’t have a CD of every program I use, this was handy.

Using this list, I reloaded all applications first starting with the most important working down to the least important. It takes time to load everything, so you won’t want to reload everything in one sitting.

As soon as an application was reloaded, I copied all of its data files from the external hard drive back on the computer. I try to keep all of my data files in as minimal folders as possible. That is where My Documents, My Music, and My Photos comes in handy, but I hate those names. For the most part, I have /docs, /media (with subfolders for music and photos), /sites (for Web-related docs).

Keeping data files in as few folders as possible makes it easier to keep them organized and to find them when you need to restore data.

Programs like Norton’s Ghost, AlohaBob, and NTI Backup Now are useful for creating and managing back ups.

Using a RW-CD and tape back up are also viable solutions. I prefer the external hard drive since I don’t have to use an external media like a tape or CD. No sitting around and waiting for the CD or tape to fill up and inserting the next one.

Thumb drives (portable hard drives) are helpful, but typically can’t hold enough if you have as much data as I do. It’s great for critical data and data that you need at all times.

When buying a USB drive, make sure you have USB 2.0 not 1.1 as most the drives require 2.0.

At a minimium, back up your data files - the products of your work. Have a copy of these file somewhere other than your hard drive. Ideally, I’d like to back up my data on a network server because:

• if my house were on fire (ptpthpthpth), the files are safe on a server located somewhere else.

However, storage is not cheap enough for personal use just yet. I am sure it’s one of the future options we can expect to become a regular part of safe computing.

Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl’s notes, eNewsletter Journal, and The Remediator Security Digest. She is also a PC Today columnist and a tour guide at InformIT. She is geared to tackle your editing, writing, content, and process needs. The native Texan resides in Plano, Texas, a heartbeat north of Dallas, and doesn’t wear a 10-gallon hat or cowboy boots.

Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can be mined over and over for additional sales and referrals. Do you use this gold mine to increase the profitability of your business?

You should! It can mean the difference between business survival and failure.

Why then do so few business owners take the time to ensure that it is adequately protected? Are we too busy? Perhaps you just didn’t know how to protect it, or couldn’t afford the software and hardware required to back up your data correctly.

Ask yourself these questions:

Is there anything more important to my business than my customer data? What would happen to my business if I were to loose all of my data?

Consider this common scenario. A client calls frantic that she’d loose her business if she couldn’t recover her customer data. She had over five years of information on her computer when the hard drive decided to make her life interesting.

So what are her choices? Renter the data manually, if she has any hard copies available. Call everyone and ask for their contact information again, won’t that make them feel secure about her company. Or call a data recovery technician. Their services can start at a thousand dollars and go up rapidly from there!

Windows XP provides a fully functional backup utility, for free! In fact, many of the commercial backup products use this backup to save the data. All you are paying for is the user interface, the window you enter information into.

Before you run the setup wizard, you need to answer a few questions.

What data do I need to backup?

Only backup data that is necessary. Use the KISS (Keep It Simple Silly) method. Your customer database and correspondence should be backed up as a minimum.

How often do I want to back up my data?

How often does your customer data change? Does a significant amount of data change on a daily basis? Weekly?

Where do I want to store my data backup?

Most data backups still use a tape drive to store the data. The problem is that they cost a fortune! The tapes alone are expensive. Alternatives are to store your data backup on another computer on your network or copy it to a CD or DVD writable disk.

Ok, so you want to backup your data. What now? Before we do that review the table below:

Full Backup
* Copies and stores a complete duplicate of your data every time it runs.
* Takes the most time to run and the most storage space.
* Quickest data recovery feature.
* Easiest!

Incremental Backup
* Copies and stores only data changed since the last backup.
* Must be combined with a full backup, and any other incremental backups.
* Most complicated.

Deferential Backup
* Copies and stores data changed since the last full backup.
* Must be combined with a full backup and the last deferential backup.
* Middle of the road.

If you have a relatively small amount of data, I would suggest a daily full backup. If you have a larger amount of data you might combine the full backup with a deferential backup. Simple huh?

The next question is how to store the data backup. Even though it takes a little extra work, I have my clients back their data up to a DVD writable disk. First, set the wizard to back the data up to a folder. Usually this folder is on another computer. Then burn this data to a DVD burner and place the disk it in a secure location for retrieval as necessary.

If you don’t feel comfortable setting this up yourself, any competent PC technician can do it for you.

Whether you do the setup yourself or have it setup by a professional technician you are taking the first step in ensuring the long term survival of your business. Please take the time to do this.

Ultimately your customers don’t care how or why you lost their information, they just care that you did. I’ll leave you with this statistic:

Estimates suggest that 80% of small businesses that suffer a serious computer failure cease trading within two years. Will yours be one of them?

Parrott Writing Services, a San Antonio Texas company specializing in web content, ghostwriting, website optimization, online/offline ad copy and technical writing to small businesses.

http://www.rickparrott.com

Send an email to: EBOOK@sasecure.net for a FREE electronic copy of my eBook on Computer Security!

Eventually, everyone faces a data disaster. Are you ready? Unless all of your electronic files are expendable, you should be making backup copies of your most important data on a regular basis.

"Your backup is as important as your data and your time—because that’s what it’s going to cost you if you lose it," says Cheryl Frogley-Rawson, an IT consultant with Helpin’ Out, a computer support company for small businesses and individuals. "Even if you have hard copies, it’s going to cost you time to enter the information again."

·Back up regularly, back up often. It is important that you get into the habit of backing up your files on a regular basis. Just having things stored on your hard drive is not enough. A computer crash, a virus, or a hard drive failure can wipe out everything. Don’t make this simple mistake! Back up everything at least once a week. Daily is better. If you use your computer daily, it is best to back up important files daily and other data weekly. At the absolute minimum, back up your files monthly.

·Keep several backup copies. Never back up over a prior backup copy - keep several copies over time so that you can back up more than one version if necessary. Remember, a problem that is backed up will remain a problem when restored!

·Be selective. You don’t have to do a total system backup. In fact, why waste your time backing up all those executable program files when you can easily re-install them from the original media in case of a problem. Just back up your important files. Backing up the entire hard drive is time-consuming, not practical, and should not be done. A backup of specific data files is the way to go.

·Know what’s really important. The most important things to copy are files you create yourself. Be they text documents, e-mail messages, pictures, or game saves, if you made them, be sure to keep their current backup handy. Beyond that, it’s helpful to back up the configuration settings for any programs you use, along with critical Windows data such as the registry.

·Organize your folders. Backing up is easy if you set your folder structure properly. It’s faster and easier to back up if all your files and subfolders are in a single folder, rather than having your documents scattered across the hard drive. The My Documents folder is a good place to store files on any Windows computer. When all your personal files are in one place you are less likely to forget a file when you back up. Organization can be the key.

·Use backup software to automate your everyday backup tasks. You don’t have to copy your files manually. You can accidentally omit something, or simply make a mistake. A decent backup program creates the backup of your data reliably and automatically, and it will notify you in case of any problem, and will log the backup activity in detail. In addition, there are a lot more useful features, all usually for a very low price.

Willson Peterson is computer expert and network engineer. He is the author of “How to backup your computer data.”

Click here ==> http://www.ebookarticle.com to visit his website.

Copyright 2005 Willson Peterson. This article may be reprinted if the resource box is left intact.

You know that you should back your data up. But you still don’t because you don’t know what to get. Here is the overview of four budget backup solutions that I’ve personally used and can vouch for.

Acronis True Image 8.0 (Acronis)

Acronis True Image allows you to create an exact disk image for complete system backup and disk cloning providing the most comprehensive data protection. The disk backup file contains the exact copy of a hard disk, including all the computer data, operating system, and programs. After a system crash you can restore the entire system or simply replace lost files and folders from your disk backup, so you don’t need to reinstall Windows. Acronis True Image 8.0 is quite speedy, creating an image of a 46 gig partition in approximately 8 minutes with little compression. Restoring a complete image can be a lot longer than creating one, but with the built in Rescue Media Builder, its as easy as booting from that CD, telling it where the image is, and what partition to restore it to. You can wander off for dinner or TV and reboot your computer to the image you have saved, ready to go in roughly 30 minutes for an 80 gig drive. The time to save and restore images is hard to estimate here because larger partitions and more compression takes longer then a smaller partition and no compression.

Genie Backup Manager Professional (Genie Soft)

Genie Backup Manager Professional is a very easy to use yet powerful and flexible software that can backup and restore files, documents, emails, settings, programs and more to virtually any local or remote device including internal and external hard disks, FTP locations, across network, CD/DVD discs, removable media, memory sticks, and tapes. GBM Pro is perfect for users of all computer comfort levels. Novice users will find it easy to create their first backup job in matter of minutes after installing the software, thanks to its intuitive wizard-based user interface, while advanced users will appreciate the software’s extended flexibility and features such as preserving NTFS Alternative Data Streams, Email notification, Self executable backup sets, and scripting capabilities (GRunScript and GenieScript).

HandyBackup (Novosoft)

HandyBackup is so easy, you might actually find yourself backing data up. HandyBackup is designed for an automatic backup of your critical data virtually to any type of storage media including CD-RW devices and remote FTP servers. You can use HandyBackup to make a reserve copy of any valuable data on your system. Special addons are provided to facilitate the backup of MS Outlook, system registry and ICQ files. Restoring is as easy as clicking a button, but you can also use a number of advanced options. The program can be also used to synchronize files between two computers on a network.

HandyBackup is designed for MS Windows 9x/NT/2000/ME/XP. Strong file encryption and multi-choice zip compression on the fly, as well as many other useful features, will protect your valuable data. All backup activities are recorded in a log file. Detailed online help is available, which is always nice.

Backup4All (Softland)

The software performs all four fundamental backup types: full backup, differential backup, incremental backup and mirror backup. Using the wizard you can easily set up any backup configuration you wish. You can define powerful file filters and schedule your backups any way you want. Once a backup is performed, you can see what files have been changed since the last backup using the explorer-like tree view or you can read the statistics about the next backup execution. You can use the context menu from the tree to run standard actions associated with the file type. I now use Backup4all to do my day-to-day backup, and I recommend it for those who want a more automated solution. It uses its own file catalog to keep track of what’s been backed up and when. That’s the only completely reliable way to do it — you can sometimes miss files with other methods.

Another safety feature - all files and subfolders are included unless you expressly exclude them (by unchecking). This means that if new files or subfolders are added to a folder, the next backup will pick them up as well. Not all backup programs work this way. Once in a while you may not want to back up a file that has been added to a folder, and if you forget to exclude it, it will be backed up anyway. Better to have backed up and not meant to, than not to have backed up at all.

Download Links

Acronis http://www.deprice.com/acronistrueimage.htm
GBM Pro http://www.deprice.com/geniebackupmanagerprofessional.htm
HandyBackup http://www.deprice.com/handybackup.htm
Backup4All http://www.deprice.com/backup4all.htm

John Deprice runs a website devoted to backup tools. To see his picks, visit http://www.deprice.com/utilities-10-1.htm

Imagine this - you arrive one morning to find that a faulty read-write head has crashed your server’s hard disk overnight, rendering it useless. Or a small electrical fire has destroyed part of your office, including your server. This server was used to store customer lists, payroll details, accounting details, purchase orders, inventories and other data vital to the running of your business, built up after years of operation and growth.

You find that you were seriously ill-prepared to deal with such a disaster. Virtually all of your business’ data had resided in this one location. No copies were made. You are faced with the fact that many years’ worth of data has been lost forever.

Insurance will replace materials, equipment and office space, but will that be enough to get your business up and running again? Your vital business data can’t be claimed on insurance, it can’t be replaced with money alone. Would your business survive after significant data loss? Unless you have a good backup system already in place, the statistics are grim…

* 43% of companies that experience a severe data loss disaster, and that have no recovery plan in place, never re-open.

* 70% of companies that suffer serious data loss go out of business within 12 months.

* It takes 19 days and costs US$17,000 (AUD$22,000) to manually retype 20 megabytes of sales data. The same volume of accounting data takes 21 days and costs US$19,000 (AUD$25,000).

* Loss of data cost US businesses in excess of 22 billion dollars in 2004.

Just as the costs of fire damage can’t be covered by insurance bought after the event, the costs of data loss can’t be avoided by acting after the loss has occurred. It is vitally important that data is backed up before encountering hard disk failure, viruses, malicious software, mistakes by employees or other causes of lost data.

Listed below are the 7 steps that we consider essential for the protection of important data.

1. Central storage of data on the network

The first step in setting up a backup system is deciding what needs to be backed up. Ask yourself, what can I afford to lose? For example, the latest Windows Service pack can be downloaded again, so there is little need to protect it; your customer database cannot so easily be replaced. Once you have identified the information you need to back up, you need to know where it is stored. Although it might seem counter-intuitive at first, as much of your critical data as possible should reside in one place on the network. It is far simpler and easier to backup, restore and protect one machine than several. As a side benefit, physical and network access to that machine (and therefore to critical and perhaps sensitive data) can more easily be restricted, improving security.

2. Multiple backups

You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket. There are many reasons why your company should have access to several full system backups.

* A single backup could fail. Tapes, CDs and hard drives all wear out eventually, so you shouldn’t rely 100% on a single backup to store your data. The more copies you have, the less likely you are to lose all of your data to wear, fire damage, water damage, etc.

* In the case of accidental deletion, data loss is often noticed days after it occured, which means that if your only backup is from last night, you have no way of retrieving the data.

* Restoring files that were deliberately deleted months or even years ago, when you thought you would never need them again, can often be of great benefit.

3. Off-site backups

If your office burns down, you don’t want all your backups to burn with it, so it’s important to physically move some of your backups off-site. We recommend that any weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly backups are stored off-site at a secure location.

4. On-site backups

While it is important to have some backups off-site, you don’t want to have to travel back and forth whenever you need to retrieve a file. For this reason it’s useful to have recent daily backups available on-site to allow for quick recovery of files. These backups are still important, and for reasons of security and reliability it is best to store them in a secure place such as a fireproof safe, rather than next to the server or on the System Administrators desk.

5. Monitoring

If you need to restore a file or a whole system, you want to be sure that all backups completely successfully. It would be disastrous to learn that your backups had failed only when you attempt to perform a restoration. One way to ensure that each backup has been performed successfully is to check the backup logs each day. An easier method is to acquire backup software that notifies you daily of the backup status and can alert you to any problems.

6. Follow the plan

If you are using tapes, disks or removable hard drives for backing up, you will need to remember to change these regularly depending on the backup scheme you are using. Neglecting to do this could cause the backup to fail or could result in an important previous backup being overwritten. It is also important that you insert the right device, as having the 4th-of-June backup data on the 1st-of-January tape would make the right data very difficult to find.

7. Regular file list updating

As you install new programs, add hard drives and create new files, it is important to know that all new data is also protected. Of course, if you are backing up the whole C: drive, for example, any new files or programs on that drive will also be backed up automatically. However, if you are only backing up specific, important files, it is vital that you keep this list up to date, or you risk losing valuable data.

Keep in mind that the average failure rate of a hard disk is 100%, as every drive will fail eventually. Make sure you stay in business by following the seven points listed above. How do you do that? Well, that’s where a backup software package can help. Data protection need not require a full time IT professional; it can be done by almost anyone with a bare minimum of time to spare — all you need is the right tool. Backup software can automate much of the process, covering the seven steps above and providing comprehensive data protection for your business.

Linus Chang is a backup expert and the lead developer of BackupAssist - tape backup software that is simple and affordable, and perfect for small and medium businesses. Protect your Windows servers, including SQL Server and Exchange Server, to tape, REV drive, hard drive, NAS and more, at a fraction of the cost of other backup software.

COMPUTERS AND HALLOWEEN, DO THEY MIX?

Computer backup is so important to your computer that to ignore it is to risk its damnation.

Computers require care and feeding. They require that you attend to their needs. If you don’t, then they will most surely be sent to Hell.

Halloween means Hell. What! What do you mean that Halloween means Hell?

Well, if your computer is given the option of trick or treat, which will it accept? Will it accept the trick or the treat? What do you think?

Halloween is the time that computers are subject to tricks or treats. Did you know that more computers fail on Halloween than any other day of the year? That’s right. It’s true (smile). Your computer is in danger! Protect it. Do your computer backups.

Back to the Hell thing. Hell you say? Yep. Well, what do you mean by Hell?

Computer hell is the place for computers without computer backup. The failure to perform hard drive backup means that you are playing Russian Roulette with your data. Data needs your protection. Failure to protect your data may cause your home or business records to be sent to Hell.

Hell in this instance is for the records and files that cannot be resurrected. Resurrected you say, what does that mean?

It means that without computer backup as a source of salvation then the files can safely enjoy eternal oblivion. Oblivion you say, what does that mean? That means they are eternally lost from computer resurrection.

Is there any mercy for my precious files, you ask?

Why yes there is. Would like to know what the mercy for your files is? Yes! Yes! You say.

OK boys and girls listen carefully. The salvation, mercy, resurrection and redemption of your files lies in regular and consistent and persistent computer backup.

If you backup your computer consistently and persistently your files will be resurrected and saved from accidental deletion, hard drive failure and those nasty things like fire, flood, theft, earthquake, hurricanes, tornados and the like!

Computer backup is the key to your data’s salvation!

Do your computer backups boys and girls.

Milk and cookies will be served in the pantry.

Trick or treat for your computer backup?

Jack Back has been in the computer business since 1983 as an IT executive and working computer consultant company owner. He has helped many clients after a computer crash who had no computer backup. Now get your FREE 2 part guide on how to quickly and easily do computer backups and to save your irreplaceable computer data from loss, damage or destruction at the Computer Backup website.

"There are many reasons to use online backup. The simple fact is that your computer could get invaded or destroyed in minutes and it can happen completely suddenly as well. The fact is that more and more people are falling victim to this type of occurrence every day. What happens is that it leaves you without all that you know and need and leaves you without anyway of fixing it. Online backup is the perfect solution though because it allows you the ability to save whatever it is that you need to without thought or worry about anything happening to it.

Online backup should be thought of as a file cabinet for all of your important information. By using online databases to store this information, you are safeguarding it from anything that may happen to your computer’s hard drive or memory. You can store just about any type of information that you need to and it is completely and utterly safe. Most information that is saved in this manner is safeguarded from other people as well. You can make sure of this by not providing your personal information nor your username and password to retrieve it.

Why do you need online backup? Well, there are many reasons. And, there are many things that you can store in there. For example, you may find that there are business clients as well as a number of corporations that store their information on their computers. In these cases, a crash can be awful. In the case of the personal ecommerce entrepreneur, important contact information for clients as well the product lists and availabilities are all necessary and yet they too can fall victim to a crash if they are stored on the computer. Online backup systems can help to avoid all of this information as well as much more. "

for more information please see http://www.online-backup-help.co.uk

In this computerized digital age, making backups of your critical data has become a crucial necessity.

You’ve probably heard the old cliché: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This couldn’t be a more accurate statement when it comes to backing up and saving your valuable data.

When your hard drive fails will you be prepared? It’s not a matter of “If the drive fails”, but more so “When the drive fails.”

Taking the relatively small amount of time, and resources to make a backup can save you and perhaps even your company potentially thousands of dollars in disaster recovery costs, loss of revenue and downtime.

Having backups of critical information is a must.

Data is simply Digital Information. Once this information is “lost” or inaccessible due to a hard drive failure, you quickly realize the value of that information.

Make Backups. Then verify the contents of your Backups, and Make Backups of your Backups.

If however you do find yourself in a quandary with a failed hard drive. Do not panic.

Here are some tips:

• *Any* sounds emitting from your drive is not a good sign. Power down immediately.

• Do NOT run scandisk, CHKDSK or any other disk checking utilities, as this could make matters seriously worse.

• Avoid powering the computer on and off. The clicking sound from your hard drive that you may be hearing, could lead to a grinding sound. Far less optimistic for successful recovery.

• NEVER, EVER listen to a computer “Guru” friend who says: “I can fix it!” Hard drives are delicate mechanical storage devices, and the inner workings and mechanics should always be left to a trained, experienced data recovery engineer. The hard drive is one of the few components of a computer that actually still has moving, mechanical parts.

If you do happen to find yourself with this type of unfortunate situation, ECO Data Recovery has been recovering critical data since 1987. Their highly skilled engineers have the ability, the “know how” and the proper techniques to get you and/or your business back on the speedy road to recovery.

Brian Cain ECO Data Recovery 4115 Burns Rd. Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33410 1-800-339-3412 561-691-0019 http://www.ecodatarecovery.com brian@ecodatarecovery.com

Sooner or later, something terrible will happen to your hard drive. That’s not a very happy thought, but the good news is you can survive a hard drive failure with only minimal inconvenience — if you back up your files.

Hard Drives Are Not Forever

They can fail without warning, a virus could wipe out your data, fire or flood could damage the drive, or it might even get stolen. You might accidentally delete a file or an entire folder of important files with an errant click. And it’s not only emergencies that make backups important… if you buy a new computer, a backup can make it much easier to copy your files from the old computer to the new one. Backup Strategies

Do you need to backup all your files, or just certain ones? That depends on how you use your computer, how important your data is, and how much you want to think about backups. If your drive fails, you can reinstall the operating system and all your software. But the data you’ve created and stored (word processor documents, spreadsheets, emails, photos, music, etc.) may not be replaceable.

So at a very minimum, you should decide which are your most important files and make backups. Here are some easy ways to back up a set of files:

* Attach the files to to an email and send them to friend. Or open a free web-based email account, and send the files to yourself.

* Copy them to another computer on your home or office network.

* Upload them to your website, or free web space.

* Burn them to a CD.

* Copy them to a flash drive or external hard drive.

Do this often - daily, weekly or monthly - you decide based on how often you update the files and how critical it is to have access to the most recent data in the event your hard drive crashes and burns. But be warned that recovering from a hard drive failure will be a nuisance if you opt to backup only your data files. It will take quite a few hours to re-install your operating system and all the software that you had. If you downloaded software, you might have lost the license or registration keys along with your data, too.

Backup on Auto-Pilot

I strongly advise automated full system backups, because EVERYTHING is safely squirreled away, and restoring your data can be accomplished with a few clicks. You could back up your data on a bunch of CDROMs, but you’d need a LOT of them to back up a modern hard drive, which can store 100GB or more. CD-ROM disks hold about 700MB of data, so even with compression you’d need over 100 of them to get the job done. Not very convenient, especially if you ever need to restore the data.

Since hard Disk drives are cheaper than ever, I recommend you get an external hard drive and use it as a backup device for one or more computers. You can buy a large capacity external drive for well under $1 per gigabyte. The Iomega 33xxx series and the Maxtor OneTouch get high marks from reviewers and users, but other manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital make good products as well. Look for a drive that supports a USB 2.0 connection, or the faster FireWire hookup if your system supports it.

Backup Software

Backup software is also recommended, to help you automate the process of making automatic full or incremental backups, and to restore just one deleted file or the entire drive. A good backup program will even allow you to store multiple versions of a file, so you can go back in time and restore a file to the way it was a day, a week or a month ago.

I use Acronis True Image (Windows) but have heard great things about Retrospect (Windows/Mac), which comes free on the Maxtor OneTouch drives, and SmartSync (Windows).

Losing data that you’ve spent countless hours creating is one of the most frustrating things that can happen to a computer user. When it comes to backups, don’t think too hard about whether or not it’s worth the trouble. It takes only a little time and money to set up automatic full system backups that give you peace of mined and protection from data disasters.

BOB RANKIN… is a tech writer and computer programmer who enjoys exploring the Internet and sharing the fruit of his experience with others. His work has appeared in ComputerWorld, NetGuide, and NY Newsday. Bob is publisher of the Internet TOURBUS newsletter, author of several computer books, and creator of the http://LowfatLinux.com website. Visit Bob Rankin’s website for more helpful articles and free tech support.