Backing Up Your Stuff Part 5: Where Is It #1?Written by Richard Lowe
I don't know about you, but I love to collect cool downloads off internet. I've got thousands of stationary files, desktop themes and ICQ skins, as well as more thousands of screen savers and wallpaper files. Most of these special files are stashed in obscure locations which makes them difficult to back up and a pain to restore.However, if you know where various applications store their data files, you can make copies of those to your hearts content. Programs such as Second Copy and InSync are perfect for this job, although in a pinch you can simply drag files to your writeable CD drive. Outlook Stationary Files Something that I love is outlook stationary. I think it great to receive a cool email with a nice background, perhaps a graphic of some kind and some cool sound. I know my wife likes to get an "Love" email from me with, say, a gigantic heart and some gentle romantic music. In fact, it's very simple to build up a huge collection of stationary files. There are tens of thousands of them available for installation all over internet. The problem is: where heck are these things installed? The answer is simple: C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedStationery Stationary files are always in this location (I have searched very hard and have never found a way to change this directory). I guess that drive letter could change if you installed operating system somewhere other than C partition, but I have not tried that out myself. Each piece of stationary consists of one standard HTML file and a number of additional graphic and sound files. By far most themes consist of single HTML file, one graphic and perhaps one sound file.
| | How Safe Is Your DATA?Written by Simon Morris
What would you do if you switched your computer on tomorrow morning, only to see an error message and to find that some of your important files had become corrupted? You may no longer be able to open some files - or, even worse, files might have gone missing without a trace.Welcome to world of data loss! If you rely on your computer, then this would be a total disaster. If you run any kind of web site or online business, things would get worse before they got better. Imagine losing your entire ezine subscriber base. Need I say more? Backing up your data on a regular basis is not an option, but a necessity - for sake of both your business and your sanity. Consider following statistics, which show most common reasons for data loss: 42% Mechanical Failure 34% Human Error 15% Software Failure 6% Viruses 3% Natural Disaster (Statistics taken from The Security News) Repeat out loud: Backup, backup, backup!! Now that you've got message, you'll need to know how to go about backing up your data. There are several options available, but for purpose of this article I want to concentrate on different methods of online backup available over internet. Basically, there are two types of online backup services. With first, once you have downloaded software and installed it on your PC you just connect to backup provider's server and away you go. Just select files you want backed up and then transfer them over internet, rather like using FTP to upload your web pages to your web host. This option usually entails a monthly fee of anywhere from $5-$20. The software is easy to use, and restoring your files is just as simple as backing them up in first place. You can back up as many files as you wish and even your entire PC if you like, although this will take quite some time.
|
