Hard drives are mechanical devices and being so means that they will enviably fail - it’s not a question of “if” but “when“. Since it’s the end of the week, I thought this was a great time to bring this up: When was the last time you backed up your computer?! I back mine up onto an external drive about every ten days - but I have made it easy for myself and I’ll show you how!
But It’s So Hard!
It can be a daunting task if your My Documents folder is a sloppy mess, but it doesn’t have to be! Windows ships with dedicated folders for Documents, Music and Pictures and there is nothing from stopping you from creating your own: Do you keep work info on your personal machine? Make a folder for it! What about eReceipts? Make one for that too! Being organized now means being able to find what you’re looking for later!
Where Should I Put All My Stuff?!
I mentioned earlier that I have an external drive - you should get one too! Backing up your data on the same drive that it’s already on doesn’t really make any sense: If the drive crashes or a virus wipes the drive, all of your stuff is hosed! Externals are pretty cheap, mine is a 250GB and is more then enough for my extensive music, movie and photo collection! A second internal drive would be fine too. I like the portability of an external though…
What Now?!
The smartest way to do this is to create an identical directory structure on your backup drive that exists on your primary drive. Personally, I keep a clean Ghost image ready in case of catastrophe. I haven’t loaded any programs on the image, but I have set my Network connections, user accounts and a few Registry Hacks - items that I know I will use again.
In case I do Ghost the computer, all I have to do is drag my backup over and rewrite the necessary folders: Documents and Settings, Program Files, WINDOWS and any other directories I want.
So How Do I Do It?
The following image shows the directory structure of my backup drive. As you can see, I have all of the necessary folders nice and organized using the same structure as the primary drive. When it’s time to recover data, I can simply over write the appropriate directory!
I mentioned that I have a backup of the Programs folder. You need to remember that you don’t need to back this up unless you have written a batch file and stored it here. Backing up this folder will not backup your programs!! For that, I have a folder on the external drive where I have archived all of the installation files for my programs.
Program Settings
While you can’t backup the actual program, you can save custom settings for most programs: Some store settings in a hidden folder named Application Data. This directory is in your user folder. To access it, hit the Windows Key+R, then type the following:
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data
Some programs save settings in this location:
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data
That’s All Folks!
You could write a batch file to automate the backup process, or navigate to the directory you want to back up, ie:
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Microsoft
It CTRL+C to copy the folder. Next, change the path in the address bar to your backup directory:
Hit CRTL+P to paste.
That’s all!
Great Post Saman! I actually just had one of my hard drives crash on me and the last time I backed up data was in August of last year! It really was a pain to find everything again (good think i emailed everything to someone) and plus, I didn’t meet that many new people where it hurt my contacts or stuff. This is definitely a must do for all computer users out there!
I do my backups to a flash drive using Cygwin+rsync. It really speeds up the process as it only copies file changes - not entire files every subsequent backup.
I also do the same for an off-site backup - that way in case of a disaster, the backups won’t be lost with the original data!
I know Microsoft release a PowerToy that does the same job, but it didn’t return any error codes in case there was a problem. I lost a lot of data because of it!
That’s when I decided it was better to handle some this important myself!
you right… don’t ever trust Mikisoft for it
Well, I don’t have a problem with letting Microsoft handling it - but Powertoys aren’t supported at all, you get what you get.
saman, you just reminded me what i have to do this weekend.
Good to hear! I’m glad that someone is taking this seriously!
Backups are interesting things. They are often neglected and forgotten until disaster strikes but they’re so unglamorous to maintain them that people just don’t want to bother with them.
Here’s a scary question for all the bloggers. How often do you do a backup of your MySQL database? We all have blogs that we probably put hundreds of hours into but most of us are really lax when it comes to making sure we could recover them if a hacker were to nuke them.
It doesn’t take much to log into phpMyAdmin and do a quick dump of the tables.
That’s a great point, I try to backup my database once a week, but it’s more like once every three weeks…
I got badly burnt from not backing up my HD once.. I turned on my pc one day, and nothing.. absolutely nothing.. my HD just died..
ever since then I try and back up regularly
Great knowing your blog. Specially knowing another blogger from Iran ( or just Iranian if I’m not wrong )writing in English. Good job Saman. Lucky you.
Thanks bud, I would comment on your site but I can’t read Farsi, I can only speak it!