Backing up your data is not a luxury, nothing you do ‘when you’ve got the time’, and certainly nothing you can skip. You cannot prevent data loss, but you can control the damage caused. A back up of your data - a copy of them on an extra medium in a safe place - is your only reassurance that in case of a mishap you will be able to recover what you have created or collected on your PC.

What is a backup?

Basically, when you backup your files, you make a copy of your data and store it on a separated, different location. This copy contains all the data you’ve created or collected such as your documents, pictures, sound and video files, anything you don’t want to or cannot afford to lose. So in case of a data loss caused by disk crash, virus attack or negligence you have a complete copy to restore your data. You then will only have lost the time needed to restore the backup.

Where to backup?

You need to copy your data to a storage medium that is “physically separated” from your PC. “Physically separated” means, you must be able to – well –separate the storage medium easily from your machine, and at least take it to the next room. Obviously backing up your data into a different folder on the very same hard drive offers no protection in case of a disk crash or virus attack. So you probably choose an USB-Drive, optical media (CD/DVD/Blu-ray), an on-line service, or even your own web space.

What do I backup?

You do not need to backup files that are easily recovered, such as your Operating System or the program files of the applications you’ve installed. You still own the license and can simply reinstall your software. Backing up these is more difficult, and not doing so only costs a little extra time. Please note that backing up your system drive is a completely different matter, and is best done by a drive imaging software.

Ideally, your hard disk already is ‘partitioned’ i.e. divided into two parts (most machines come preconfigured in that way nowadays), a drive “C:” for your operating system and all your programs, and a drive “D:” for your data. A simple answer so would be, copy all on drive “D:” to a backup medium.

How often do I need to backup my files?

Well, that obviously depends on the amount of data you can afford to lose. And of course, the frequency with which your data change. If you only write one letter per week you will need to backup far less often than if you use your PC for work, spend a lot of time on it, and create a bunch of files daily. A good rule of thumb is probably to backup your data before shutting down the machine for the day, professional developers backup by the minute, or even in ‘real time’ i.e. while they write.

How do I backup?

As a backup is simply a copy of your valued data, you have a good choice of possible methods. You can easily copy them with your file manager to an external USB-Drive, which may even be a Thumb Drive, and keep the original (the source) in synch with the copy (the destination) using a file synchronizer. If you chose an optical medium, you will need a burning program or use a backup program that allows backing up to optical drives.

Use two backup media!

Let’s assume you backup on a thumbdrive and you do that daily. You are copying your files from your hard drive to your thumbdrive and now this very unfortunate moment your hard disk crashes taking the system down and also destroying the data on your thumbdrive. You would have lost both the original data on the hard drive plus (!) the backup data on your thumbdrive. This may not be a likely event, but it is a possible event, leaving you with nothing but tears to shed about the loss. So what can you do? Get a second thumbdrive! On the even days of the month you use “Thumbdrive A”, and on the odd days you use “Thumbdrive B”, so in case of this most unlikely disaster you still have all the data from yesterday on the other thumbdrive. This also leads to another advice: don’t have your backup medium – in this case your thumbdrive – permanently connected to your machine! What would you do in case of a virus attack? Unplug it, put it in your desk, and if the data are valuable, put them in a locker in the bank.