Protecting your information with backups

Although modern computers are extremely reliable and rarely fail, it can be catastrophic if they do!

There are many components inside a modern computer, and the failure of any one of them can result in your computer not working. While most of these components can be replaced fairly easily without you losing any information, if your Hard Disk Drive fails it is very likely that you will lose all the information stored on it.

There are companies that specialize is rescuing information from disk drives that fail. However, these services are unlikely to be cheap, and depending on the problem causing the drive to fail they may not be able to recover all, or any, of the lost files.

To safeguard your information against loss you should perform regular backups.

A backup is a copy of the information on your Hard Disk Drive and is best stored on media that can be kept separate to your computer - such as CDs, DVDs or tape.

While you may not want to backup all the information on your computer, you should think about what information you don't want to lose if the computer fails. If you have pictures of family and friends which have been taken with a digital camera, the only copy may be on your hard disk - you should seriously consider making a backup of these files, which cannot be replaced!

Programs must be installed from the installation CD (or download file) in order to work. There is no point creating a backup of the folders that contain program files (e.g. C:\Program Files\) as you will be unable to reinstall the program from a backup.

Since Windows and programs need to be installed from installation CDs, or files, you need only consider backing up your data files, which hold the information you have created.

The process of putting files from a backup back onto a computer is referred to as a restore.

Storing data on CD or DVD is usually considered to be permanent, and any information stored on one of these will last forever. However, studies have shown that this is not the case and the information stored on CDs and DVDs can degrade over time.

Information I have read recently suggests that the information may only last a year in some cases! You should bear this in mind when performing backups and if the information is really important you should consider creating new backups every few months.

For more information on how to create a CD backup of your information, read the following document:

Writing (Burning) Files and Folders to CD in Windows XP Top