How to back up your computer system

Why should you back up your data?

Because it is quite easy for the data to be lost or become unavailable. This could happen in a number of ways e.g.:

Your computer / laptop / hand held computer (PDA) might be stolen or you might lose it.
The computer hardware might fail or be damaged in some way.
A virus (or other malware) attack might corrupt your data.

What should you back up?

As a general rule you only need to back up any data which you would cause you grief if somehow that data become unavailable to you. You should consider backing up the following:

Your documents
Word Processing files
Spread sheets
emails
Financial data
Photographs
Pictures
Music files
Video files
Etc, whatever would cause you grief if you lost it.

Home User

You should get into the habit of organising your valuable data to live in folders under one main folder. For example a good place to put it on a Microsoft Windows system is under the My Documents folder.

You probably don't need to back up the application software, e.g. the word processor, email client, you use since it should be either on the disk you bought them or you can down load them again once you have restored your computer system.

However, note some applications can keep your vital data in other folders, for example Microsoft Outlook does not keep your emails in a folder under My Documents, and you have to reconfigure it to do so.

There are a number of choices you could used depending on how much data you have to back up. You could use any of the following:

Floppy disks – very limited use since their capacity is so small (1.4M)
CD ROMs – writeable CD 650M these days are very cheap disks (£0.10 GBP per disk) and most computers can write them. Down side can be slow writing large amounts of data.
DVD ROMs – writeable DVDs 4G are more expensive than CD ROMs but have much bigger capacity. The downside is they can be slow writing large amounts of data.
USB Memory Sticks – Come in various sizes, are very easy to use, are quick, but can be expensive for larger sizes.
External Hard Drive – Moderately expensive, but are by far the quickest way of backing up large amounts of data.
Music MP3 / Media Players – e.g. the Apple Ipod, expensive in comparison as an external back up media, but if you have one with spare space, then why not use the spare space?

Note: You could use compression software to reduce the amount of actual space use. Some operating systems have it included, but for others you have to obtain the software separately.

The following are examples of the types of software which will help the back up process and compress on a PC

Examples of external hard drives that can be used for backing up

Business User

Depending on the size of your business and the type of data you have it may be adequate to follow the home user strategy. However, the business grows beyond a handful of machines networked together it becomes impractical to visit each machine everyday and have the users back up each machine.

At this point you will need to consider possibly storing all your important data on a server and backing up that machine.

Storing all the data on a single server greatly simplifies the backup task. However, the server machine will need to have at least two disks and be operated in a mirror configuration so that if one hard disk fails it does not stop your business.

In future editions of this article we shall explain how to perform backs in a networked environment.

At this stage it may be worth employing someone on a part time basis to a manage the network for you.

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