If you use a computer, eventually you’re going to wish you had backed up your important information. It could be a hard drive crash, or an accidental erasure, or a nasty virus. You can guard against losing everything with a little planning and discipline.

So, what is backing up? It’s just saving a copy of your important stuff in a “safe” place – generally a different place than on your everyday working computer.

If you have a computer full of stuff, deciding what to back up can, at first glance, be intimidating. Consider this: how much of your computer do you already have backed up? For example, in the event of a major disaster, if you have the original system software disks that came with your computer, you could just reinstall the system from those disks. You most likely have the original disks of the other applications you’ve purchased, so those are covered as well. What’s left? Your personal stuff.

If you’re not heavy into digital photography or video, chances are the data files that make up your digital life take up less space than you think. Remember that most applications have basically three parts: the application itself (already backed up on the original CD), the Preferences file (generally containing your serial number information, and your personalized settings), and the data files (for example, a Quicken file containing your financial data).

So what, specifically, should you back up? Data you can’t compute without. Address book. Email mailboxes and addresses. Calendar. Web browser bookmarks. Financial and tax data. Digital photos and music (although if you have the original music CDs you’re covered there). Important letters and documents. This is certainly not the definitive list, but it will get you started.

What media should you use to back up? That depends on the size of your data and your budget. Let’s look at some common media, and weigh their pros and cons.

The venerable floppy disk. Cheap, but small 1.4MB capacity (my Quicken data file for this year won’t fit on one). Easily damaged. Plus, your next computer probably won’t come with a floppy drive.

Burn to CD/DVD (optical media). Assuming you have a CD or DVD recording drive, you have two choices here. Write-once CD-R and DVD-R/DVD+R, or rewriteable CD-RW and DVD-RW. CD media of either kind is fairly inexpensive. CDs can hold around 750MB of data, DVDs about 4.7GB. CD-R and DVD-R are only good for one writing session. CD-RW and DVD-RW can be overwritten with new data, but reliability degrades with each writing. All optical media is fragile – any scratch or blemish on the data side and all you’ve got is a nice shiny coaster.

Iomega’s Zip drives are also popular. Zip disks (floppy disks on steroids) start at 100MB capacity, and are rewriteable.

Hard drives. If you need to back up digital photos, video or audio, an external hard drive has the space and speed you need. Speaking of speed, I recommend a drive that connects with your computer via FireWire or USB2.0. The downside of an external hard drive is, well, it’s a hard drive, and can crash or become corrupted just like the hard drive you’re backing up.

Secure web storage. If you have a broadband internet connection, web storage can be very convenient. Apple’s .Mac members have 100MB of web storage, and a Backup utility that can schedule backups, and suggest what you need to backup. If you have a dial-up connection, forget it.

Finally, how often should you back up? It’s up to you. Certainly, you should always back up before a major system upgrade. Better safe than sorry.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski