Create your own safety net

Back up your important computer data and guard against a computer meltdown.

by Ward Lowe   Joni Mitchell once sang that "you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone." While Mitchell’s concerns were more environmental than technological, her refrain aptly applies to your computer data.

What would happen to your business if right now your PC crashed and wouldn’t reboot? If beads of sweat just appeared on your forehead, you probably need a strategy to back up your important computer data. There are plenty of ways to accomplish this, but first, decide what you need to back up.

Sometimes, less is more

If you choose to duplicate your entire hard drive, you won’t have to decide which items to back up and which to ignore; you’ll just copy the drive. But today’s hard drives are quite large, often capable of storing at least 30 gigabytes (GB) of information–that translates into more than 21,000 floppy disks.

If your system lacks complicated file structures and consists mainly of clients’ contact information, documents, photos, a few spreadsheets, and Internet favorites, it’s easy to pluck the files and folders you want and keep the backed-up information down to a reasonable amount.

Sit down and list the data you would need to continue to run your business if your PC died. Envision your computer being replaced by a new, generic PC loaded with Windows and basic programs like Word, Outlook, Excel–but nothing else. What data would you need to make it as useful to you as your old computer?

After you create that list, locate the files responsible for this essential data. Many people save items like documents and templates, spreadsheets, and photos under the My Documents folder on their hard drive. This folder usually lives at C:\My Documents or C:\Documents and Settings\(your name)\My Documents.

If you’ve put your important personal documents under this folder, you can easily capture all the data you need by backing up this folder and all its subfolders. If the files you want to back up are spread around your hard drive, consolidate them into one place, such as subfolders within My Documents, to facilitate backups.

You’ll also want to back up your contacts, e-mail messages, Internet favorites, and other settings unique to your computer. Most of these items live under the Desktop, StartMenu, Favorites, AllUsers, and ApplicationData folders located under C:\Windows or C:\Documents and Settings\(your name).

Be aware that these folders won’t catch certain settings like Netscape bookmarks or AOL e-mail contacts. Consult with a PC-savvy colleague to ensure you’ve found everything on your list, including items not mentioned here.

How many bytes in a file?

Once you’ve located everything you want to back up, translate those folders and files into gigabytes, megabytes, or kilobytes to determine how much data you need to copy. Right-click on the Start menu and choose Explore from the list of choices to display the contents of your computer. Navigate through the tree of folders and files to locate the ones you want to back up. Right-click on each item and choose Properties to display its size. Write down that number for each item and add them up to arrive at the approximate amount of data you need to back up.

Of course, if you have all the items you want to back up in one folder (e.g., My Documents), you need right-click only on that folder and record the size listed. Regardless, now that you know how much data you’ll be copying, you can choose how you’re going to secure your data.

Back up a little

You can get away with copying a few megabytes onto floppy disks. Long the standard removable storage device, floppies are cheap (about 25 cents a piece), and until recently, all computers have come with a drive capable of writing data to them. However, their capacity–up to 1.44 megabytes (MB)–is often insufficient.

If you’re interested in preserving very little information–maybe only your address book and a few Word documents–use the Windows backup utility along with a few floppies. It’ll take five or 10 minutes and you’ll have to keep feeding disks to the PC as they fill up, but there’s no sense spending money on hardware you don’t need.

The new standard

Most business users need to back up too much data to use floppies. Duplicating e-mail messages, contacts, desktop settings, Internet favorites, Word documents, accounting files, and other data needed by a typical business user easily adds up to several hundred megabytes–meaning hundreds of floppies. Or you can use one CD.

Major computer manufacturers have replaced the floppy-disk drive on some new computers with a rewritable CD drive (aka CD burner). These new drives enable you to read data from and write to CD-Rs, which can be used only once, or CD-RWs, which are reusable. The main reason these storage devices are taking over is that for little more than the price of a floppy disk, each CD can hold up to 700 MB. You would need almost 500 floppies to handle that much data.

Adding a CD burner costs anywhere from $50 to $300–with most capable devices running a little more than $100–and can be installed as an internal component or simply plugged in like a printer. Most software that accompanies CD burners improves on the Windows backup-utility interface, making it easy to locate and move files and folders from your hard drive to the CD.

Not only are CDs cheap, but they are portable and easy to store. If you’re a home-office user looking for a reliable backup system, a CD burner may be your answer.

Right next to the car keys

If small and portable are high on your list of must-haves for backup devices, several companies now sell memory devices about the size of a Swiss Army knife. These "keychain" drives can hold an impressive amount of data (8 MB to more than 2 GB), plug directly into the USB port of a computer, don’t require external power or cables, and are instantly recognized on most recent Windows operating systems.

Two features to consider in addition to storage capacity are data-transfer speeds and security. Some of these drives protect stored data behind a password; one model even incorporates biometric security with a thumbprint validation. Some of the popular brands of USB storage drives are Trek ThumbDrive, DiskOnKey, Sony Micro Vault, and EasyDisk.

No disks, no mess

You can store your backups in cyberspace and skip the purchase of disk drives. For a monthly or annual fee, you use the storage company’s software, which schedules your backups and encrypts and compresses the data for transfer, to upload your data to its servers.

Although you avoid the cost and effort associated with the maintenance of drives and media, online backups are too slow unless you’ve invested in high-speed Internet access. Even then, initial backups of several hundred megabytes can require hours; subsequent backups save time by duplicating only files that have changed since the last session.

SwapDrive, @Backup, and iBackup are just a sample of companies geared toward single-PC and home-office users that offer this online service. SwapDrive and @Backup each charge about $300 per year to manage 500 MB–less data than a single CD can accommodate–while iBackup charges about $110.

Online backups do allow multiple users in different locations to access the same backups, which might be important for a small brokerage with employees working many miles apart. Also, your backups are stored off-site, which preserves your data in the event a disaster like a flood or fire destroys your computer equipment.

Big-time backups

If your memory needs creep above 3 or 4 GB, you need to consider a rewritable DVD drive or external hard drive. These devices can provide a full backup of your hard drive or move a similarly large amount of data.

Rewritable DVDs hold almost 5 GB of data, more than seven times the 700 MB on a CD, and are very compact. However, there are significant drawbacks to DVD drives. They’re priced at several hundred dollars; come in three different, incompatible formats; and the cheapest DVDs cost about $5, although some models require discs priced closer to $15.

External hard drives can provide an easy, one-touch way to back up 20, 30, or 100 GB. Most home and small-business users don’t require this amount of data storage, but if you want it, numerous manufacturers offer any manner of hard drives that connect to your PC and will replicate its entire structure for safekeeping.

Test drive the drive

Whatever your preference for a backup device, make sure it works before you need it. Attempt to back up and restore one or more files with the software that accompanies your device and see what happens.

It’s much better to spend 20 minutes on the phone with a tech-support person when you’re testing the backup device rather than when your system crashes. Work out the kinks now and rest assured that in an emergency you’ll know what to do.

Finding the right frequency

How often you perform a backup depends on how much work you’re willing to lose. If most days you add documents from transactions and contact information for new customers, you may want to duplicate your data once a week. But if you can live with a few lost pieces of information or don’t rely on your PC for everything, then a monthly backup might suit you better. Critical information that changes daily should be backed up every night.

Find a schedule that works for you and stick to it. The only way you’ll benefit from backing up your computer is if you can recover data when you need to. Skipping a scheduled backup because you’ve never had a problem with your PC may eventually come back to bite you.

Rotating your media also lessens the chance of problems with your data. If you back up everything you need weekly on a rewritable CD, don’t use the same one every time. Alternate between two CDs so that even if you discover a problem with your backup, you can still return your data to where it was less than two weeks previously.

Photo © PhotoDisc.

home   current issue    top 10    resources 

discussions   contact us   search

Buyers & sellers, visit www.texasrealestate.com.
REALTORS®, visit www.texasrealtors.com.