How to Backup Your Computer

By Howard Jones

If there are questions during the presentation, please ask them. If there are questions after the presentation, please address them to me at hwjaaj@charter.net. Members of the club are encouraged to contribute their experience during the presentation.

Background:

There’s a broad range of computer hardware represented within the club. Some have 5-6 year old computers with Windows 95, 98 and 98 SE for their operating systems. Many have replaced their older computers in the last 1-3 years with new ones that use Windows ME, 2000 and XP. Although there are features of your computer hardware and its operating system that make “how” you back up your data different, the reasons to back up are the same for all of us. We’ll discuss the “how” later.

I’d first like to discuss why it’s important to “back up” the data/information you have created on your computer. There are several things that can happen that can make it impossible to find/access/recover/use the data/information you have saved to your computer’s hard drive. They are listed below in the order most commonly seen in my recent experience.

Virus/worm attacks when an attachment to an email message is opened. Such an attack can render your computer’s operating system unable to perform, including making it impossible to copy/transfer your data from your computer

Spyware/adware threats come in different flavors. The spyware agent can be malware (modifies system settings, and can perform undesirable tasks on your system), hijacker (redirects your browser to web sites), dialer (dials a service, most likely porn sites, for which you are billed!), trojan horse (is attached to a program, and performs undesirable tasks on your system), collectware (collects information about you and your surfing habits).

Hard drive failure. This can be an “impending” failure, in which case you “might” have time to save data, or a complete and catastrophic failure in which case the hard drive is not salvageable.

At this point some of you may be thinking, “I know all that” – and for some of you this may be new information. What’s important is that everyone understands the implications of events/circumstances that have the potential to render something you have generated or saved on your computer, unavailable/gone – forever.

What’s Not Covered:

The focus of this presentation is the most basic saving of information that is stored on your computer that you would feel very unhappy about if it’s lost. There are references to supplementary information, at the end of the handout, to help you search for a more in-depth understanding of the broad aspects of the material presented. But I do not intend to cover the following:

• Backing up your entire hard drive/drive imaging
• Partitioned hard drives
• Multiple hard drives
• Networked computers
• Registry backup
• Symantec's Norton GoBack/restore utilities

Another topic that doesn’t require much conversation is that of saving data in applications that have a built-in backup feature such as Quicken, MS Money and Family Tree Maker.

Whether saving data to a floppy disk or CD, it is recommended that you have two backup data disks and that you alternate between them for another measure of protection should one of the disks become corrupted.

What’s Important to Backup?

The three most common sets of data that would be missed if your computer malfunctioned are My Documents, photographs (which may be filed in you’re My Documents folder) and your Email address book (and perhaps your Emails if you are in the habit of saving them). For most computer users, the information created in applications for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. is saved in My Documents. My Documents is the MS Windows default for saving data. Whether you have created subfolders or used the default subfolders, for My Music, My eBooks or My Pictures, they can all be saved together.

There are many ways to organize the information that you create in the use of your computer, such as setting up special folders under Local Disk (C:). It’s only important to know where your data is stored so that you can select those files to be backed up.

There is another category of files that one may want to save and that’s information in applications that do not have a built in backup feature. MS Greetings Workshop is one of those programs. I found the saved projects in C:\ Program Files\Graphics\Projects. Another such application/program would be one in which you save recipes. One must determine in the application where saved files are located and then use Windows Explore to locate them in order to back them up to a floppy or CD.

When Should You Backup Files?

The frequency for backing up your data depends on how you use your computer. For example, you want to back up your financial data – Quicken or MS Money – every time you change or add data/information. So, when you write letters or add addresses to Outlook Express, there’s new information that would be lost if your computer malfunctioned. However, if you backed up My Documents or OE once a week or once a month, you would be salvaging the majority of your records.

Photographs are another matter. Depending on how important your photographs are you may want to save all images on a CD in addition to your hard drive. The decision to a great extent will be based on how the images were initially created. If they’re on a CD from WalMart and you load them onto your hard drive so that you can send them to friends and family, you already have a “backup”, the original disk. But if you downloaded them from a digital camera to your hard drive, you may want to create a backup CD at that time.

How Do You Back Up Your Data?

Your options for backup media at this point are a function of what hardware your computer has. Older computers may not have a CD burner so your only option may be the old reliable floppy disk. Floppies will hold only 1.38 MB of information, which for limited files may be adequate. If you’re working with photographs you’ve most likely added a CD burner and probably a larger hard drive for more storage space. Somewhere between floppies and CDs (700 MB), tape drives and Zip drives became popular for data backup. And for many with new computers, DVD burners will store 4.7 GB of data, excellent for storing photographs.

But let’s stay with the basics for most of us. You’ve identified the files/data you want to backup. I generally make notes on paper to list the files I want to backup and to note their size. How do you find out the size of the files? Right click on Start, left click on Explore. What you see is the file structure of your computer on the left 1/3rd of your monitor screen. Locate the My Documents folder. Left click on My Documents and a dialog box opens. At the bottom is Properties. Left click on properties to open another dialog box. Under the General tab it will tell you “Size on disk” of the My Documents file. The one I just looked at is 424 MB. That’s too large to fit on a floppy disk but it will fit on a CD.

Using this process look at the other data/files you want to “Back Up”. You can always break up large folders into smaller files. It’s much easier if you have structured you’re My Documents into subfolders. Photographs can be copied to a CD in the same manner. Again, it’s easiest if your photos are saved in folders, to categorize them by families, holidays, vacations, etc. It not only makes them easier to backup but to find in order to use them.

The next step is to copy the files to media, again – a floppy disk or a CD. This will also work with a DVD. This next series of steps will work with all operating systems from Windows 95 through XP. It is necessary for 95 through ME. Windows 2000 and XP have built-in backup utilities, which I will address later.

Open Windows Explore by right clicking on Start, left click on Explore. The file structure of your computer will be on the left 1/3rd of your monitor screen. Right click on the file you want to save to a backup disk and a dialog box will open. Move the curser about half way down to Send To, which will open a smaller dialog box with a series of options. Earlier you will have to have decided what media you’re going to send the file to for backup based on the size of the file you’re backing up. For the most part I’m assuming you’ll be sending the file you’re backing up to a CD. This means you will have had to open your CD burning program and formatted a CD to copy the files to. This is obviously what you would have had to do to make a floppy disk ready to save to or copy to. In a CD burning program you must decide when you finish copying the data how you want to close the CD. I choose – “close the CD to be read on any CD drive”. This way you have a CD that could be read in a new computer if you ever had to replace yours.

If you have Windows 2000 or XP, left click on Start, go to Programs, Accessories, System Tools and to Backup. The Backup utility has a Backup Wizard, a Restore Wizard and enables you to create an Emergency Repair Disk. The Backup tab will display your computer’s file structure and will lead you through the steps I’ve taken you through above manually. The nice feature of the Backup utility is that you can schedule Backup to occur automatically, which is fine if you’re on a network or have a secondary hard drive to back up to. This is beyond the basic manual backup that is the topic of this presentation.

To backup your Outlook Express data, in OE go to File, Export, and select Address Book and/or Messages. Save them as a Text File (Comma Separated Values - .CSV) to a floppy or CD.

Supplementary Information:

I encourage the use of the Internet to search for information that helps me understand how best to understand and use my computer. Therefore, here’s the link to the Google Toolbar if you don’t already have it –

Google Toolbar – free download – a good ad blocker

http://toolbar.google.com

To help in the preparation of this presentation I did several Google searches and turned up information that may be of interest to club members. The following links were obtained by doing a for – “How to Backup Your Computer” -

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/update/backup.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/update/wherebackup.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/update/howbackup.mspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011030811033.aspx?Query=back+up+data&Scope=HP%2cHA%2cRC%2cFX%2cXT

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010549151033.aspx?Query=back+up+data&Scope=HP%2cHA%2cRC%2cFX%2cXT

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/moredone/backupfiles.mspx

http://www.aarp.org/computers-howto/Articles/a2002-07-15-backup.html

http://www.wellesley.edu/Computing/Backup/backup.html

http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/backupclass.html

To better understand spyware/adware I found the following Website –

http://simplythebest.net/info/spyware.html

To better understand viruses I found the following Websites –

http://www.tulane.edu/~dmsander/Big_Virology/BVHomePage.html

http://www.howstuffworks.com/virus.htm

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/vinfodb.html