It's amazing how much information & keepsakes most people have on their computers.  Personally if I did not have backups and I would lose my data, I would be without most of the pictures we have of our daughter growing up, pictures of my wife becoming president of the AARC & pictures of my niece getting married.  Not to mention our banking & stock information; nor tax returns I have scanned in for the past 8 years, who knows where the hard copies are anymore; my business accounting records & my trusty resume just in case I really want to work for a living.  You might not be as dependent on your computer as I am, but it does sneak up on you.  Check to see how many valuable pictures and documents you have on your computer.  Most people are surprised.  Can you risk losing that?  If not here are some things you can do that are relatively inexpensive to insure you're safe.

In today's world, the price of an external hard drives is definitely worth the peace of mind (this has replace using a DVD burner).  This is one of the easiest things that you can do.  Most come with a backup program, I prefer to copy & paste to keep the files in original content.  It also gives me the opportunity to better organize my documents, etc.  Because I'm a fanatic at this, I've lost my business data twice in the past & after the last time swore I would never allow it to happen again; I also have 2 hard drives in our home server.  The second one is used as a clone hard drive.  Once a month approximately I will use "Ghost" from Symantec to clone all the information on the second hard drive & then disconnect so just in case lightning would strike it still should be okay.   If you're a novice hardware person & this scares you, have a friend install or try reading my tips from October 29, 2007 article.  It's really pretty easy & once again hard drives are relatively cheap.

The last thing I do is, because all of the newer systems come with oversize hard drives, I will backup information (by using the xcopy command) to the other 3 computers we have in our home network.  I'm an old fashion guy & to expedite this I wrote a "batch" executable file & stuck them on the desktops of the various computers.  Even though my wife & daughter are suppose to save everything to the server they don't always do this & secondly there are items like the Microsoft Outlook pst file that are automatically copied to their computer (not to many people have an Exchange server at their house).  I wrote the batch (*.bat) to only copy files that have change from the last time.  All of this is assuming you have a work network either LAN &/or WAN.  If you Google "xcopy" & "writing a batch file" you'll find all kinds of articles on how to do this.  And this will be a forthcoming tip article.

To recap, for home protection of data I utilize three different methods.  I use an external hard drive to backup the server; an additional hard drive that I clone to & then disconnect; and batch files that will xcopy to the 3 other workstations in our house.  Keep in mind I have set up the same user accounts on the other systems to make this work. 

It's late so for the time being "Happy Trails to You" & thank you for reading my ramblings.