Backing up computer

[90grad]

All,

Since this just happened to me, I wanted to put out a message to everyone.  Thursday night, my home computer's hard drive decided to take a complete dump.  Thankfully, my friend was able to recover the drive with the help of a $129 hard drive recovery program.  I still had to buy a new drive, though.  I had talked often about backing up my drive, but never did. So, I spent the last two days basically rebuilding my home computer.

Today, I am going to buy an external hard drive (under $100) and periodically back up my main hard drive.  So, DON"T BE LIKE ME -- BACK UP YOUR STUFF!!

As more and more people are getting CD burners on their computers, you might try this suggestion.  Most people have the original programs on CD's  and can restore from there.  What needs to be saved is what you create, data files, documents, etc.  A collection of re-writable CD's work like extra drives for your computer and if formatted correctly can also be viewed on other computers.  If you have a DVD burner, so much the better, larger storage capacity.  Just a thought, hope it helps.

[90grad]

CD/DVD burners are cool and I've got one.  I think Norton puts out a program called "Ghost" which after you back-up the drive once only adds what you've changed since the last back-up.

[Pixel]

My family had a Gateway 2000 P5-75 PC from early 1996, well this was before the CD burners came along. Eventually I was able to get a Memorex 6X4X2 CD-RW drive for $40. The company I bought it from wasn't totally forthcoming about the fact it wasn't a retail drive, but I was stuck with it more or less so I kept it.

I like to draw crap from time to time and tinker with building web pages and such.

About four years ago, I was doing something in Windows and all of a sudden I lost almost all of the Programs in the Start Menu. They weren't there anymore. I went into the filesystem, and to my horror all the files had garbage characters for filenames. That HDD did that twice before quitting, and the Memorex CD burner served me well in keeping my drawings and web pages.

Alas, that CD burner died too, after I built this machine I'm typing on. So I replaced it with a high speed Samsung. Unforunately I have had mixed results with CD-RW on both drives (especially packet writing), so I stick to CD-R's for most of my backup.

CD burners are my best friends when good Hard Disk Drives go bad.

As an aside, I still had the old HDD in case I can ever experiment to see if I can get any of the old data off of it that I wanted but didn't really care enough about to back up.

[Creighton]

Ghost is great. It will restore to the last known good and is quicker than most. Sadly all systems will fail. I keep copies of important stuff on two hard-drives. Cut that content to DVD every week or so.
Creighton

[Kilroy]

My thoughts from the years I spent in the trenches doing Tech Support (ok, still doing it. Yeah, I'm crazy):

Most CD or DVD Burners come with backup software bundled as part of the software included. I think XP now supports CD/DVD backup, a simple drag and drop to the burner (I say think since we are a windows2k. Novell shop)

Test your backup. Copy a file or 2 to a temp directory to make sure you can actually reload, and access your backup. I've seen too many backups make reaaally nice coasters. Test again. and darn it, pitch the AOL disk that showed up in the mail, and use the jewel case to keep your backup scratch free. Been there done that. It was was ugly,

Don't forget to backup your address books in your mail client. Outlook and Thunderbird allow you to export the data. Same with your favorites links in your web browser. I keep a copy of my saved ID's passwords in a small notebook, away from the computer. store it with your CD's of software. I haven't looked real hard to find how to view saved ID's/passwords in Internet Explorer, but in Mozilla Firefox, it's under Tools, Options, Passwords, view Saved Passwords.
- Copy down your settings in your mail client. Most ISP's provide instructions for configuring Outlook, Outlook Express, etc, Hey, I'm overly cautious. Sue me.

Sorry for the rambling, but when it comes to computers, I've pretty much seen or heard it all. This is a great group of people, and i finally got the chance to share  myknowledge and experience. Ok, not about pop machines.

Oh yeah, one last thing. The story about someone calling tech support when they were using their CD-ROM tray as a cofffee cup holder? It's an urban legend.
:'>

[Creighton]

Great words of advice Kilroy, Thanks!! Did the tech support thing for a long time. It's brutal, hang in there :-)
Creighton