A Complete Backup Guide For The Home User
May 30 '01

The Bottom Line Everyone should backup your personal files and even your entire harddrive. Use a dependable device and that's the best insurance policy to have.

Computer backups are more essential these days than they have ever been. With the amount of computer viruses circulating on the internet through email, you should always have a backup on hand just in case the worst comes to reality

What Should I Backup?

There are many important things people forget to backup that can be very tedious to restore.
1. Documents – You should back up your entire My Documents directory or wherever you store your Documents. Any text files stored in other folders should also be backed up.
2. Email & Address Book – For people using email programs like Eudora, Outlook or Netscape, you should backup all your email addresses and address books.
3. Miscellaneous Files – You may have pictures, fonts, backgrounds and other files which are hard to get back, you should back them up.
4. Install Files – Especially for people without Broadband connections, consider backing up the installation files for your programs so you won’t have to download all your programs again.
5. Personal Profiles and Settings – For example, people who use Netscape should back up the User directory so they won’t have to do over all their settings. You should also back up your Favourites and Bookmarks.
6. Instant Messaging Contacts – For people who use programs like ICQ which store contact lists on your computer, you should back up your entire list and history.
7. Cookies – Many people overlook this but it’s a pain to have to enter your username and password over on every website that you use. Backing up your cookies can save you precious time

For businesses, you need to also backup your accounting files, consider backing up the entire program so you can easily restore the accounting system.

How to backup?

You can do your backups manually by transferring individual files to your backup source using Windows Explorer. You can also use third party software to automatically backup certain directories.

The program I used is called Second Copy 2000. It copies directories I specify every day to another hard drive. Then I burn CDs from the hard drive. I can set the software so it only backs up if the files have been changed. This program costs $29.95 and is shareware. Visit http://www.hotfiles.com to download it.

If you have a second hard drive, you can clone your original hard drive. I use Symantec’s Norton Ghost 2000 software which compresses the entire hard drive into one image file. You can automatically boot from this image if the original drive fails using a Norton ghost diskette.

Its hard to tell you exactly how to backup in an opinion but I’ll give you some guides here. Below I have listed the location of some of the thing you may need to backup.

Outlook Express Email and Address Book
The outlook address book is normally located in
c:\windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book, copy the .wab file. To copy the email messages, use the export utility within Outlook, File-Export-Messages.
Check our software page for a OE backup program

Netscape
Copy the enter directory of c:\Program Files\Netscape\Users . This will include all Netscape mail, cookies, preferences and bookmarks.

Internet Explorer Cookies
This is located at c:\windows\Cookies

Internet Explorer Favourites
This is located at c:\windows\Favorites

Windows Fonts
These are located in the c:\windows\fonts\

Windows Backgrounds
These are located in the c:\windows\ directory. Copy all the .bmp files.

ICQ Files
These are located in c:\Program Files\Icq\(Version No.)

What to backup on?

There are many different storage devices you can use to backup on. I will look at the most popular, Zip drives, CDR/W and Additional Hard Drives. I purposely left out Tape Backups because this opinion is intended for novice home users, not businesses needing to backup many gigabytes of data.

Zip Drive

Zip drives have evolved over the years. They were intended to replace the floppy disks but haven’t totally yet. They are very popular though. They are available in 100mb and 250mb versions. The 250Mb version is backward compatible with 100mb disks but not vice versa. Zip drives cost from $50 to about $150 depending on if you want an internal or external drive. Zip drives are ideal for home users who need to back up very little. Zip disks cost about $10.
For XP try a new USB Thumb Drive.

CDR/RW

CD Writers or Burners are becoming cheaper every day. A speedy 12x/10x/32x drive costs about $250. You can easily get a slower drive for much less than $200. CD media is also very cheap. About 30 – 50 cents for a one write disc and about a dollar for a Rewriteable disk. Rewriteable disks allow you to clear and modify files stored on a cd and are excellent backups. Each cd holds 650 Mb of data. CD is my preferred offsite storage device.

Additional Hard Drives

Hard drives are very cheap, you can get a 20Gb hard drive for about $100. So it could make sense to buy a second hard drive. It could be as big or smaller than your original hard drive. You can use the Second Copy software I recommended earlier and constantly backup files as soon as they are modified to the second hard drive. This allows you to have and immediate fix. You can also copy your entire drive contents to the second drive for and instant restore.
With today's new USB drives this is a good choice.

Where to store my backups?

For those who use a Zip drive or CDR/RW to backup only, then I suggest you keep one copy of the backup near the computer and another offsite. The offsite backup is an insurance policy just incase your office/home burns down. For people who use a Hard Drive and CDRW/Zip backup system, keep the cd or zip backup offsite. Keep backups in safe places. Pay the extra money to buy good plastic cases so your backups don’t damage or get dirty.

My pick

For my personal computer. I have a second hard drive which I let Norton Ghost make an Image of the first hard drive onto it every day. I also use the Second Copy 2000 software to backup certain files, like the 7 I listed earlier to a directory where every week, I burn to a CDRW.

Other Notes

You may have realized I did not mention online storage. Well honestly, I do not believe in it. In fact, X-drive recently abandoned its free advertising based offer and I ended up loosing the files I had there before. I am also weary of storing confidential data on someone else’s hard drive. If you are confident in online storage, you can use it to backup things like your documents, address books and emails. The size limits may not allow you to upload much more.
 

XP's Files and settings transfer wizard also makes and nice backup program.