Back Up Your Data Today

Before we talk about how to backup your PC, we need to talk about WHAT to backup on your PC. First, you have to determine how much space you need in order to choose an effective backup solution built to suit your needs. No one backup solution is right for everyone.
First, if you save everything into your “My Documents” folder, it makes backing up really simple. You can even make a “downloads” folder in your “My Documents” folder to save things you download.
You can simply open your “My Documents” folder and click “Edit” and then Click “Select All”. Next, right click on a file or folder and click on “Properties”. This will show you your file size (Mine is 10.5GB so you can see a 1GB flash drive or 700MB CD would not work without multiple disks).Using The Windows Backup & Restore Utility
For those more experienced pc users, another option would be to utilize the windows backup and restore utility. Although this may sound a bit overwhelming, the process isn’t as difficult as one would imagine.Other Things To Backup
Here are a few search terms to help you find other things to back up in order to remain Windows Version independent.
Favorites – Search your C: drive for “favorites” (open the folder to make sure it contains your favorites)
Bookmarks (FireFox) – Search for “bookmarks.html” (open the file to make sure it contains your bookmarks)
Outlook Express – Search for “Outlook Express”. This will find a folder. Open the folders and make sure it contains your E-mail folders. If you have never created subfolders in Outlook Express (OE), now would be a good time to so that you can find your e-mail to back it up. If you create a folder called “test” in OE, it will be in the appropriate folder as “test.dbx”.
Address Book – search on “*.wab” - dbl-click to see if it has your contacts.
Microsoft Outlook – Do a search on “outlook.pst” – You can dbl-click it to see if it has your mail, contacts, etc.
Always check file sizes – Add them up at the end. How much data have you got to backup?
Possible Backup Devices:
Floppy Disk – 1.44MB (Do they make these anymore?)CD – (700MB) – cheap solution. Under .10 each.Flash Drive (Range in Size from 256MB to 8GB) $10.00 - $200.00Zip Disk (250MB-750MB — Are these still around?)External Hard Drive – You can get a 160GB drive for under $100.00