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BACKING UP

Do you often plan to back up your files for months on end but never knew really where to begin. Well, no longer with this simple guide. Computer users create things they value and want to save. These include letters, projects, financial records, and even digital pictures. You will want them to be there whenever you need them again.

With all these precious documents sitting on your hard drive, you are probably fast running out of space. Plus, there's the ever-present risk that a virus or rogue application will come along and trash your drive. Hard drives crash. Not very frequently, but they do. It's one of computing's facts of life.

Drive manufacturers often project MTBF (mean time between failure) rates. One drive manufacturer rates 500,000 hours MRBF (57 years of running time). A more realistic figure is the same vendor's service-life projection of five years. Yet no matter how well drives are made, they can fail at any time due to internal damage that occurs during assembly, shipping, or moving. Plus dropping or jarring the computer or drive causes an early demise. Static electricity is a known drive killer. Another data destroyer is user error. Simple mistakes are cause of data loss; no matter how many years you've been computing.

The only way to protect your precious files is to back them up. It's not very hard--or as tedious--as you probably think. We'll show how to determine what to back up. And follow that with using a tool that comes with Windows.

Backing up data simply means making a copy and keeping it in a safe place. Backups are also usually compressed to save space. In network installations they are typically saved to tapes. Home users with CD writers can backup to CD-RWs (typically 650 MB). Other options include floppy disks which given their tiny capacity of 1.44MB and penchant to fail, should be used only for small amount of data that needs to be transferred else here. The Iomega ZIP (100-250 MB) and JAZ (1-2 GB), and the SuperDisk (120 MB) let you backup more. Finally, there's the CD option mentioned earlier.

Once you're ready to take the plunge and safe your data, you need to determine which files should be saved. The easy way out, damn the backup outlay, is to back up your entire hard drive. But this is an impractical approach if your backup media is less than the size of your hard drive. Some CD writing software have an option to backup the content of your hard drive onto multiple disks.

One work around on space limitations is to compress (zip) your data. And then save a certain amount to your media of choice. The downside of this approach is that you can't restore a file directly; you need to uncompress and/or extract it from its archive.

We recommend backing up your data files, mailboxes, and system settings. And if you have any system drivers for which you don't have a physical copy, add them to the list. The obvious personal candidates are documents, spreadsheets, financial files, pictures et al. Plus e-mail archives, address books, stuff from your personal information manager, browser bookmarks and cookies. These should be easy to locate if your drive is well organized and you know where your files live.

If you are new to computers, or are generally in another world, we've taken the trouble to pinpoint where most files live in a Windows system. By default, Microsoft Office saves documents to C:\My Documents. Most Windows applications use this default data folder, as also its sub-folders like My Pictures or My Music. Others, usually store information in their folder. Look in the folders at C:\Program Files.

If you know the name of a file to back up but can't find it, try Start|Find|Files or Folders. In the Named field, enter file name. In "Look in" select "Local hard drives." (Windows 95 makes you search each drive separately.) Be sure to check "Include subfolders." Now click Find.

And if you share your computer, especially with family, be sure you identify what's valuable to others. There's nothing worse than a teen whose lost her favorite Hrithik picture or a wife who can no longer find that Durga Puja photo.

G Menon
[email protected]

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