And so the Duo come to the main event, storage-wise: the hard drive that's spinning inside your PC. Especially on the computer you use at home, chances are everything's on that hard drive. What happens if it crashes? If you haven't backed up your hard drive, you're likely to lose more than your temper--a serious crater can ruin your whole year. When that hard drive goes bad or gets wrecked by a rogue program, you may well be able to get the stuff on it back from the dead. It may be simple, or it may take the help of a very expensive data-retrieval service. But it's also possible that you're just plain out of luck, as Angela--who lost an irreplaceable file with family history info from her late grandmother during a crash several years back--will bitterly attest.
So you need a backup strategy. And that's probably going to involve either an external hard drive or something round and shiny like CD or DVD disks. But you can also think about using the Net to store your stuff on somebody else's drives, just like at work--an option called the "virtual drive" that the Duo will address a bit later in the show.
First things first, though: The first thing you've got to decide when it comes to backup is whether you want to back up just your data--documents, e-mail, spreadsheets, music files--or the whole darned machine, right down to the applications and settings you keep on it. If you go with the data-only strategy, the idea is that in case of a crash, you'll be able to restore the operating system and all your applications from those install disks you keep handy.
Alas, neither option represents a perfect solution. Those application-installation disks are probably months or years old, so when you're done installing, you'll probably end up spending a lot of time downloading and installing the latest patches and fixes from the Web. And some of the applications you use may have been downloaded from the Web in the first place; if you haven't backed those up, you may have to jump through some hoops to get a replacement copy, since presumably your registration info is ... wait for it ... on the dead drive. On the other hand, the data-only strategy is definitely simpler, and reinstalling everything could help clean up a bunch of junk that's probably accumulated on your disk--and by the time you have to do it, you might decide the heck with it and just go out and buy a new machine. But you've still got a big restoration project on your hands.
With Macs, naturally, backing up tends to be simple--so you may as well back up your entire machine unless you're short on a place to put the info. With Windows machines, total backups get really complicated because if your computer dies, you're going to have to boot it from something that's not your hard drive so that you can get access to the backup you've made. Generally, that means creating a CD-ROM disk that lets you boot into a sort of bare-bones version of Windows that will let you run your restore program. Or you'll have to restore your system partway from your original disks. It's a complicated process, and unfortunately many backup programs don't tell you what you need to know about it.
It gets worse. In the interest of simplicity, some backup programs will have you back up data just from familiar folders like My Documents and My Pictures. Trouble is, you may not keep your stuff in those folders. And some backup programs may not be able to back up data from programs like Outlook, which puts your information in a bad place and locks your information while it's running.
Some software offers to back up every file every time you save it. Sounds great at first blush, but those programs may only save a limited number of versions of that file. Steve offers an example: Say the program keeps the last three versions of the file. You start working on that spreadsheet in the morning of one of those days where you just wake up stupid. You save, and you resave, and you resave, and you go to sleep. Waking up the following morning back in your right mind, you realize you really want to go back to the version from the day before yesterday. Under the auto-save scheme, that's not an option. The moral of this tragic tale, besides "don't compute stupid"? You really have to understand how the backup software works and what it's doing for you. Otherwise, you're likely to discover that you're not protected the way you thought you'd be.
The best of the backup programs Steve has tried is Retrospect 7 from EMC Dantz. It's more complicated than it needs to be, but the software's creators have definitely given a lot of thought to backup problems. Angela has no specific recommendation (not having found a program yet that meets her needs); a lot of the software she's seen is simpler, but it could get you in trouble when you go to restore. In any case, says Steve, make sure at minimum that your important files are getting backed up at least once a day--and that you can always see at least the previous day's version. A week or a month's worth of daily versions is even better. You won't need it often, but when you do--when the universe lets you compute stupid, or when the hard drive simply gives up the ghost--you do.
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