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Oh No, Where Did it Go?There are lots of reasons why you might need a good backup of your computer system. A virus could scramble your data. An electrical storm could knock out your electricity and corrupt your hard disk. You might install a program that was incompatible with your system, forcing you to restore the whole thing. Or your hard drive may suffer a simple mechanical failure and you have to replace it. In any event, you'll wish you had a backup. Get in the habit now of regularly creating a backup any time you have a file that would be difficult or impossible to recreate. If you could reinstall all your software if needed, then you may just need to back up your data. Decide how much information you need to back up first. Next, determine how you want to store your backup. Almost every computer has a floppy disk drive, and floppy disks are pretty inexpensive, so that is an option for small amounts of data. However, if you've got a lot of information to store, expect to use many floppy disks. Also, floppy disks can be easily damaged. You should never keep your only copy or your only backup of important material on a floppy disk. At a minimum, use Disk Copy to backup your backup. Many new computers come with Zip, Jaz, or tape drives. These are ideal candidates for backups. While the tapes or disks are more expensive than floppy disks, they hold much more information. If one isn't built into your computer, you can still purchase an external drive from most computer supply stores. If you have an extremely large amount of data and don't want to handle the backups yourself, you can also use a commercial backup service. Before you rest easy that your data is safe, make sure that you test your backups. Try to restore a few test files. If you simply copied files to a separate location, make sure you can still open them. Make sure that you have a reliable backup system in place and that you use it regularly. |
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