On any given day, I work with about 35 folders on my desktop and another 75 or so in the “My Documents” folders. Every evening, I back everything up onto my PC’s 2nd hard drive, as insurance against an HD crash.
My question: What’s the most efficient way of backing up these files & folders—and of keeping track of which ones really need to be updated? My typical procedure finds me left clicking, highlighting, and dragging every single folder onto the icon of my 2nd hard drive, but I’m wondering if there is a more efficient, perhaps automatic, back-up process.
XP’s Files and Settings Transfer Wizard seems designed to switch files/folders from an old PC to a new PC. And I have no clue if the “Briefcase” would assist me.
I use Acronis True Image backup software (~$50) to do nightly backups to my external HD. I do a full backup first and then do nightly incrementals that grab every changed file and update the archive. Automatically!
Get all the stuff that needs saving under a single folder (with subfolders for organization), then you just copy that one folder to back it up. I have an “ImportantData” folder where I keep everything that needs external saving. I don’t use the My Documents folder at all. I told my wife that anything she needs saved has to be under the ImportantData folder or else she risks losing it if I get a whim to suddenly reinstall the OS.
Then it’s just a simple backup of the ImportantData folder to DVD on a regular basis and I’m golden.
There’s no reason to have stuff all over the place.
On Windows 2000 and XP (not sure about Windows 98), it’s possible to point the My Documents desktop shortcut at something other than the default. So you can set it up so it points to your ImportantData folder if you like. That way, if you or your wife does put anything there, it’s still backed up.
On my office systems, My Documents points to a folder on a drive on a server that’s a RAID array and which is backed up regularly.
At home, I’ve configured Quicken so that the data folder is a subfolder of My Documents, and I try to configure other programs to do the same thing. That way, all I need to do is backup My Documents.
You can also create batch files that copy or backup a list of file/folders and then run the batch file as a scheduled event at, say, 2 a.m. I do this to create spare daily copies of certain critical files as a hedge against the failure of my regular backup HD-HD process. (I came from the DOS world, so batch language was more accessible to me than VisualBasic, which can do far more, but is more than I care to learn at my advanced age.)
I developed this technique when I found (the hard way) that my backup process wasn’t working the way I expected it to, and that I couldn’t access an uncorrupted version of a database file that is absolutely critical to my business. I now save separate copies of this (and a couple of other important files, like the outlook.pst file) every night into a directory, on a separate hard disk, named for the day of the week. Thus in case of a HD failure or virus infection, I have seven copies of these files that I can go back to if I have to, entirely separate from the weekly full backups of the operating system and daily incremental backups of all my data files.
I second Rex’s comment. I have used several backup software packages included those that have been listed on this board. I have grown attached to Windows Backup. Very easy to use and already installed.
If you don’t see it in your version of XP under system tools you can install it from the disk. On your install CD go to VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP .
Although Windows XP Professional Edition and XP Home both ship with NTBackup, only XP Pro installs NTBackup by default. You can install NTBackup for XP Home by performing the following steps:
Insert the XP Home CD-ROM.
Navigate to the VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP folder.
Double-click the ntbackup.msi file to install NTBackup.