Hard Disks Don’t Last for Ever! I T Can
Help Eastern England
|
|
One of the few certainties in this life is that your hard
disk has a limited life. One day it WILL
let you down. Do you really want the trouble and inconvenience of keying in
all your documents again (assuming you have hard copies), or trying to
remember all your friends’ and colleagues’ addresses and email addresses, or
losing all your hundreds of valuable emails? Here’s one scheme for ensuring that you lose
the absolute minimum without spending hours doing backups. ·
Buy a rewriteable CDROM drive, IDE for preference,
but parallel port if you have used up your four IDE ports or have no slots
left (even then, you could install it in place of your existing CDROM). ·
Buy a few CD-RW disks. ·
Download, install and register SmartBackup from Jam
Software (see Links page). ·
Specify which directories (even down to file level)
you need to backup. There’s no point in backing up installed software though,
just your own data, documents, email files (outlook.pst, Hotmail .dbx files),
Favourites, your SmartBackup program data files, etc. ·
Make it easier to keep track of your data by
keeping it in as few directories as possible, i.e. as much as possible in
subdirectories within My Documents. ·
Refresh the backup preferably daily, but certainly
not less than weekly – it only takes a few moments, as it is incremental. ·
If you really want to be paranoid about it (like
me), install a second hard disk (physical, not just another partition) and
take occasional compressed image copies with Drive Image or Ghost, then you
won’t even have to reinstall your software! Also, with a second hard disk you
can do incremental backups even more frequently, say, after spending an hour
creating a vital document! Don’t delay, don’t pray – it will
happen! |