Follow these notes to Backup your personal document just incase your computer crashes.

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Have you ever lost all of your work that was saved on your computer? I have, a few times. I learned a very valuable lesson. That lesson was to make regular backups of my personal files such as Word Documents and My Ever so Precious Pictures.


Backup: Backup means to make a copy of your files as they are right now, onto a CD or another computer. When (not if) your hard drive crashes you will probably wish you made a backup. Making a backup can be done in just a few minutes if you own a cd burner, or even DVD for thoughs of us with lots of stuff.

A backup is not for perminatly storing your files, that would be Archiving.


One of the bigest things to help you keep a nice backup and to make it quick and easy is to have all your info in one main folder, such as the My Documents folder. Keep Subfolder in My Documents for Each Person that uses the computer. If you have Kids, Make a folder for each of them. Show them how to save their stuff into their folder and not the main My Documents Folder. Make sure you yourself have a folder for all of your personal files, and actually keep them in there. Each person can and probably should have a few subfolders of their own. I recomend having one called Word Documents. This would be where you keep your word documents of course. A folder named Pictures would be a good place to keep your pictures. I always have a folder called Varioius Files. This is where I keep various files that don't belong in the Pictures or Word Documents folders.

Make sure you Give your Word Documents and other files Appropriate names. You can use many keywords to help you find the file later.

I always sudjest dating & labelilng all of your files. A Word Document might be called.

2004-12-25 Christmas Letter to Susan.doc

When you see that in a few years you will have a good clue when it was written and how old it is.


Your Pictures Folder might Look like this:

2003-12-25 Christmas
2003-12-31 New Years Eve Party
2004-01-02 Family Ski Dat At Park City
2004-01-05 Jessica Anderson Birthday
2004-01-21 - 28 Mexico Family Vacation
2004-02-15 Jason Anderson Mt. Rainier Hike

(each folder contains pictures from that event)

I recomend dating your files in that format YYYY-MM-DD to keep your files in order. The date also should be kept at the BEGINING of the File name to be effective.


If your My Documents folder doesn't fit on the CD then it might be a good idea to Perminatly Archive some of your Files onto a CD or DVD. (Make 2 or 3 Copies of the same Disc just in case something happens to one of them.)

Making a Backup:

Using your CD burning software drag the contents of the My Documents folder to the CD Compilation area. (Remove the archive folder if you have one)
Put a blank CD into the Drive.
Burn the cd.
once the cd has been burned. LABEL THE CD!

Make sure you use a Soft Tipped Permainate Marker
Include:
The FULL Date YYYY-MM-DD
the Word BACKUP
the word My Documents (or what ever it is a backup of)

Put the disc in a cd case and put it in a safe place. Pretty Soon you will have a stack of back up CD's.


With CD's being as cheap as $0.25, it is more than worth it to make a backup every 2 Weeks. That is about $5 a year in CD's.
I think that is well worth it!

Spending several hundreds of dollars on a digital cameral then not spending a few dollars on backup is pretty stupid if you ask me.