I just got an email from my friend Miche who said,

"My laptop is sick at hospital. Hard Drive failure. Am praying data can be retrieved."

Her exact words.

Ohhhh : tremors of fear running up and down my spine!

Why?

Because ... and I have to be honest ... I haven't *backed up* my laptop for ages!

Oh I can hear your derisive laughter, your looks of scorn ... I can feel your disbelief.

Me - of all people - admitting this. My friends call me "TechieGirl"!

Well, best part of my friend's scary dilemma is that it's forcing me into action!

I'm dusting off cd burner and plugging into power, plugging it into USB slot - now how *hard* was that? I've got a stack of blank cds gathering dust on my desk ... why not use them?

Hmm ... why not do a *big* backup on first of each month, and a *mini* backup every Monday [or Tuesday or Friday ... whatever works best for you]?

::::: Plan it! :::::

OK - stick with me here - open your online Diary or Appointments Database or hard-copy Diary and make an appointment *with yourself* - which part of week could you devote say a half hour to, to do a quick backup? What about when you sit down to open mail, or read a report, do your return phonecalls? If you work from home, why not start backup as soon as you get out of bed so it'll be done by time you've had your walk, eaten your breakfast, and showered.

I can hear you saying, "Oh it'll take too long ... I'll do it later ... tomorrow ... next week ... next month ...". And then one day I'll be getting an email or a call from you saying, "If only I'd backed up computer ..."

Imagine losing all your documents, projects, databases, passwords, software settings, names, addresses, phone numbers, email names, website links - YIKES! I'm scaring myself again!!!!

If I lost even *one* thing in that list above, I'd be in BIG trouble - REAL BIG trouble.

::::: What do I backup? :::::

Good question. The most important thing NOT to backup is your software.

You do have all original cds, don't you? And you made copies of those cds when you bought software, right, as a *backup* in case original cd failed? Didn't you? Yeah, I thought so ... no-one bothers to do that, but it's one thing which could save your hair from going white overnight after your computer dies.

MUST backup:

* LOGINS, ALL passwords, FTP access codes, banking details, etc. Where do you currently keep this info? Please don't tell me it's in a little book on your desk ... oh so easy to get lost, to get put in someone else's pocket, to go walk-about. You should have a password-protected spreadsheet or document, or even better - a password-protected database. I have a database which I open as soon as I create a new login, or add myself to a mailing list, or join a new news group etc - paste info in *as* you create it, to ensure you'll *never* forget it. Sure, you sometimes get confirmation emails with this data ... but if your computer has *died* ... get picture? You can't access emails!

* CLIENT documents / projects / websites (if you're a developer), in fact ANYTHING which could cause grief if you lost it or didn't have a copy of it. If you've printed a lot of this stuff, what would you need if you had a *fire* and lost all your paper files? Think about that. Hard. Now make a list and maybe have a backup cd for each Client or group of clients, depending on your business.

* EMAIL software folder which should include ALL your emails. You do *keep* all emails don't you? Please tell me you're not one of those people who deletes emails as soon as you read them (business ones I mean). Have you ever considered that emails are a form of *database*? I can search my Eudora software for any word or phrase and in a nanosecond I have a list of emails relating to that item (all neatly filed in their email folders ... but that's *another* article!). I *love* Eudora's features! Getting back to business, emails with historical information on projects are invaluable to see who said what and when they said it. It's a timeline, tracking resource, for a project's life.

* PHOTOS, personal, professional - unless you're using them all time, these can be kept on CDs on a regular basis. When you download from digital camera, save to cd straight away and save space on your hard drive [note to "self" : follow own suggestion]. If you have photos related to a project or client, save them to Client cd you created earlier, if there's space.

There are a number of things that can bring down your computer, some of which include a power surge, hard drive crash, careless mistakes, viruses, a fire or theft.

If your system did not come with a recovery disc, you should consider making a backup disc as soon as possible. This is important should you ever need to rebuild your system to its “as bought” condition.

How often you back up your data varies from person to person. It depends on volume of data input, frequency of change, and nature of your data. A general rule of thumb would be to back up anything that would be difficult and time-consuming to re-create.

How to backup data: