It’s hard to believe sometimes that a lot of people never backup their computer. There have been those who go years without doing a single backup of files that they add to their PC. I’ve heard of a horror story that happened quite a few years ago. A friend of mine had 5 years worth of work on his hard drive and one day he lost ALL of it. He never backed up his files. His hard drive was bad. I don’t remember anymore what the real problem was. Having problems like this is only one of many reasons to backup your files. Another reason is in case some day you need something that isn’t on your hard drive, but, hey, is it in one of my backups? Information retrieval of old data. You just never know when you may need something from days gone by or even months and years? Ok, hey, I’m not a business you say, why should I be that concerned about backing up my files. Well, if the above isn’t enough of a motivation for you, just give it a few times of loosing your files, and you’ll get the point - he he he. I’ve been there myself and it does get old. There was a day in which I did not back up my files.
While the best media to backup your files is tape, you can also backup files to CD, DVD and/or Flash Drives. Tape backups are the most reliable and last longer than the other options. If you are in business, you will want a backup rotation of your media so as to be able to access files for a particular day or week.
Having an automated backup system running behind the scenes is a good way to backup your files. Whether or not you are a business, you can do this. You can use Windows Task Scheduler or Microsoft Outlook Task scheduler to do this. Just set up a task to have your backup job run at particular days and times. Such as 3:00am in the morning. Then the next day change the media and go on with your day. This way you never have to worry about this process, since it is being done for you.
I have 2 backup jobs that run each morning. The first one starts at 6:30am and the second starts at 7:00am. So, by the time I am ready to use the PC, this process is long been finished. If you are using an XP computer, you will need to stay logged into an account in order for the jobs to run.
Any questions, feel free to ask. Good luck!
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