by Andrew Freyne

Created on: December 24, 2008

When it comes to computer maintenance I am still fairly new! I love my computer and I do tend to multitask whilst online. Whenever I am working on something my greatest fear has always been that my computer would crash and then ultimately I would lose a whole day's work! How would I be able to retrieve all that data? This was a situation that truly haunted me! A few times in the past when I computer knowledge was very limited I would get on with doing what I had to do and that was that! Yes, my computer let me down a few times and then I lost everything. The information, the data, it was lost forever. Whilst going through a book on computer maintenance the word backup was emphasised! I learned about the importance of keeping regular backups and that by doing so, this was the initial step in setting up a disaster recovery plan!

I'm just your everyday small guy! I have my one pc and as I mentioned, I do lot of different things online which includes writing articles for several online writing sites. So, I have a lot of work which I store on my system. I also have the obvious Internet favourites which are vitally important to me. So, that was the huge task ahead of me! I had to start keeping regular backups of all my work, I had a problem though! Where was I going to backup my work? Whilst I was studying this book on computer maintenance and installation, in the section on keeping backups it mentioned the idea of purchasing an external hard drive. This sounded like the right thing to do and so I did some research online and was able to find an external harddrive that I liked, I subsequently made the purchase.

You would think that creating a backup is easy but not everyone knows how to do this and I certainly wasn't sure what exactly I should be backing up. Most importantly, I wanted to be able to back up all my work but what I considered to be equally as important were the files required to boot the computer, these also had to be backed up. Anyway, I purchased an Iomega portable hard drive and it looks like one of those classy whisky flasks, all red and shiny! I connected it to my computer via one of the USB ports and this seemed to work just fine. In short, I carry out regular backups on a Friday. I firstly back up what's called the Documents and Settings folder and this contains all your important desktop files including your Internet favourites. There's other data that I also back up and this is referred to as the system state data. These are the files needed to boot up your computer! If you get a system crash or anything then you can reinstall your backup and get your computer up and running. This is my brief story and how I have come to learn about keeping regular backups.

Keeping regular backups are an absolute necessity in today's world. Make sure you get yourself a hard drive that you can back up all your data to. What is the cost to you of losing all that data? I feel so secure now knowing that I carry out this important task on a weekly basis.

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