Backups for Beginners

Every person who uses a computer creates things they value and want to save. These may be business letters or love letters, school projects or work projects, financial and accounting records, or digital pictures of the kids. Whatever they are, you want them to be there when you need them again.

Are these precious creations safe sitting on your hard drive? If you're nodding your head yes, think again. Even if you have a brand-spanking-new speed demon of a computer, an unpredictable disaster could eat your data.

Your house could burn down or be flooded, trashing the business records, term paper, or novella stored on your hard drive. But a hard drive crash is far more likely. Hard drives crash. Not frequently, but they crash. It's one of computing's facts of life.

Drive manufacturers project heady "mean time between failure" rates. For example, the lowest MTBF that Western Digital specifies for any of its drives is 500,000 hours. That translates to about 57 years of running time. A more realistic figure is found in Western Digital's service-life projection of five years. But no matter how well hard drives are made or how long they can last under ideal circumstances, a drive can fail at any time due to insidious internal damage that can occur during assembly, shipping, or moving. Dropping or jarring the computer or drive can cause an early demise; so can static electricity charges. And a few drives will fail prematurely no matter how well you take care of them.

There are other hazards for your data as well. Do you use the Internet? You could fall prey to a virus or Trojan Horse that eats files or drives. And here's another possibility: User error. Simple human mistakes are a huge cause of data loss, and no matter how many years you've been computing, the day may come when you respond incorrectly to a particularly evil dialog box. Suddenly, your precious data is gone.

The only way to protect your files is to back them up. It's not as hard--or as tedious--as you probably think. In this article, I'll show you how to determine what to back up, and then show you how to do it using a tool that comes with Windows 98.