Bacjk up

[druiaghtagh]

I understand the need for backup but how does it work, do you just back up everything and reduce your hard drive space, can you save it to disc or another website. I f you save it to hard drive what happens with system crash that requires a clean install, thankyou

[vehelpfulguy]

Back up means saving it to a place where the files cannot easily be lost, so putting files on another hard drive is not really the answer.

You can backup to a web site, but if the company goes bust you may lose all your data.

For home users the best back up is to CD or DVD.

It is easy, cheap, and can be done fairly quickly.

You do not need to back up everything, just your personal files.

I keep all my personal files in the "My Documents" folder (not on the dekstop), and every so often I copy those files to CD or DVD.

I keep all my files in one folder called "MyStuff" and before I copy it to CD or DVD I rename the folder with todays date like "A220807". After I have backed it up I rename it back to "MyStuff".

That way each folder on the CD or DVD has a unique name, and I can easily see the date of the latest folder.

I always copy the data to TWO CDs or DVDs in case one fails.

[vehelpfulguy]

One thing to consider is "incremental backup".

If you have thousands of songs or pictures on your computer it does not make sense to back them ALL up to CD or DVD each time you do a backup.

If you did you would have loads of CDs or DVDs with the same data on them.

But you may have downloaded some NEW songs, or got some NEW pictures, and you want to back them up, but picking out he new songs or new pictures to backup may be difficult.

Incremental backup is backing up ONLY those things that are new, or have changed, since the last back up.

You can buy software programs that help you manage your backups, such as Acronis True Image.

I have to be honest and say I have never used any of them as I manage my own backups, but it may work for you.

More here:

http://eu.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/t rueimage/

[druiaghtagh]

Thankyou for swift reply, you have lived up to your name !