Backing Up Your Computer What do you do and how often do you do it?

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

Well the title kind of says it all, but how often do you backup your computer like you pictures, music, and stuff?What do you do to back it up, like do you just back it up to a CD or e-mail it to yourself and put it in a folder? anything? lol what do you do?i back up my files daily..most of the pictures i downlaod are uploaded somewhere else for my website them deleted off of my computer so i dont really need to update those, but since i run like 4 websites i have to update those files daily because my friend might have changed somthing..just to be safe..but i do it dailywhat i used to do and still do is i put WHAT files i have on my flash drive, then i also e-mail it to myself..and not too long ago i had this file on an old byethost account that i had, in which was a backup of my flash drive...so you could say i backed by computer up just a little bit! lmao

[sm00nie 0]

I hardly perform backups, but when I do it's usually once or twice a year and those backups only include my images and personal/work related documents. I should do it more often, but I rarely have any problems with my computer and I"m not worried about power outtages (I have surge protectors). Also, I usually purchase another harddrive every year and clone the existing contents over to it and use the old drive as a temporary storage (after formatting).So far I have backup pretty much every image I have on dvdr's.. I have about 5 or so fully loaded atm, all stock photos and 2 dvdr's with custom designs, personal/work docs... Next backup in July

[xJedix 0]

I occasionally back-up my personal files and information.... What I like to do is when my sister brings her computer home from college, I just back-up my data to her computer so I have a duplicate. She has a 160 gig hdd and doesn't use it for much, so she has a lot of free space.My brother thought of a pretty good idea if you like to occasionally re-format your hdd or to somewhat protect your files from viruses. What he did is made 3 partitions on his hdd. One is for windows xp Professional edition operating system, one is for the fedora operating system, and the other is for his personal data, music, movies, etc.... When re-formatting your hdd, you only have to re-format the partition with your operating system. So then you don't have to back up your data to do a reformat. Just an idea I thought I would share with everyone, it has worked very nicely for my brother. I'm planning on do this to mine once I decide to reformat my hdd again

[tt3 0]

I rarely back-up my computer! I know I should, but it takes me ages and I don't have the cd's or dvd's spare to perform backups. Also, I've had a very bad experience with backing up in the past. Once, I used the Windows 98 backup program, to back up my entire harddisk to a file. It was going well untill - 'Please insert another disk to continue backup'. Whoops! Should have remembered the FAT32 maximum filesize limit! Didn't bother again, untill QVC did a Last Clicks on Norton Ghost, selling it for ?23 (around 40 US Dollars) and I decided to buy it, and did a backup of my D: drive (I have a system, where Windows and Program files are on C:, and My Documents, music, downloaded program install files etc are on D:)So when I got another computer, with 2 harddrives, I thought "it'll be easy putting all the files back on!" Unfortunately, Norton Ghost had errors reading my disks, so I had to network my 2 computers together and transfer the files that way. 20 disks wasted on a faulty backup set! Like the poster above, I have all of my documents, on a seperate drive, so if my Windows crashes, I can format and reinstall without losing any documents. If you don't have 2 harddrives, you can still create 2 partitions (which is where you split one hard disk into 2 drives) using FDISK which is an application which can be run from a dos boot disk. That will wipe everything off your harddrive though, so make sure you backup! You can partition without losing all your data, I believe Symantec's Partition Manager will do that.

Edited February 20, 2006 by tt3 (see edit history)

[inyourarms 0]

I don't really back up things.. ever. I know I should but nothing much is like amazingly life-or-death important. I upload most pictures to photobucket, and my school work's all printed out. So yeah.

[epox 0]

the first thing i always back up is my documents, there are a coupkle of things so important to me in my pc, like flash aplications, word documents, excel documents, presentations, and a few designs i make whe i'm boring.i think the internet is my hard drive, so i almost never back up music files, my operative system, software, movies and all that, if have to search all again it's no problem for me, it's a problem for my p2p client, but i almost never do multimedia backup, unless i have made it.to keep my files secure, what i do is burn cds, and send me a mail to my gmail mail account, and that's all

[Hamtaro 0]

Sometimes I back up a lot, sometimes I very rarely do it. Lately, I've not been doing it much. Normally, what I do is create a zip/gzip-tar archive and burn the files to a CD-R. Sometimes I put them on my flash drive and move them to my HD running Linux (that's my only method of putting files on it through Windows). However, I don't usually have enough media/memory to backup my data, so I'm stuck with no method of backing up my data.

[Galahad 0]

Even though I lost my data, more than once, I'm still a sloppy backup person I only backup my files at work, and that too is rarely... I usualy put my projects on a USB flash drive, and take them home, to work more on them, and that kind of serves as my backup... We also have one computer, that has one shared drive, where we all should put backups every day... I'm glad to say, I'm not the only one, NOT using this feature ;)I personaly dislike most of the comercial backup programs, because most of them, will take 10MB file, and turn it into a 20MB file, which is, you must agree, pretty stupid... Instead, I physicaly copy my files, to other destinations, and if something is very important, I put it on a CD, for safe keeping...Backup is a very good thing, and people should get a habit of making backups from early days, it's a good habit...

[tt3 0]

Sometimes I back up a lot, sometimes I very rarely do it. Lately, I've not been doing it much. Normally, what I do is create a zip/gzip-tar archive and burn the files to a CD-R. Sometimes I put them on my flash drive and move them to my HD running Linux (that's my only method of putting files on it through Windows). However, I don't usually have enough media/memory to backup my data, so I'm stuck with no method of backing up my data.

I reckon a lot of people have that problem. First floppy disks became too small to perform backups, and now cd's and dvd are becoming too small as well. Backing up is just too much hassle for the home user, and that 's why you'll find that a lot of people don't bother. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't believe Windows XP Home came with the backup utility already installed.

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

well i donot think it is the windows XP that comes with it pre-installed because my bosses computer whichi fixed for her this summer was a Windows XP Home edition and it came with a back-up tool.but that was a Peopl PC computer...by the way..never go with those computers i dislike them >_<, neways, i know the dell computers dont come with it, but maybe if you added it in the application, lol..

[htdefiant 0]

I do not backup that often...when I had to reimage my HD because a surge protector failure, I purchased a 120 GB External Hard Drive. It is nice. Back to the point, I guess I should do backups more, although I am very diligent about spyware and viruses, so I guess between that and a good surge protector, the chances of sudden loss of data is low.

[smartbei 0]

Here is a scenario that happened 4 days ago: The computer doesn't recognize the hard drive at boot. I open it up, and play with changing the ribbon cables, thinking maybe it got pinched or something. No go, so I had to buy a new hardrive. What do I find? my last backup is in september >.< . Ho well. I should have backed up more often .

[bladeron 0]

i have a separate 80 gb hdd only for backup for stuff like music, videos and moviesnow i m also planning to buy an external hdd from maxtor of capacity 300gbi generally back up my data at the end of every month coz i am very scared of losing my collection of songs and movies

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

wow im supprised allot of these people dont back up their computer as often as they should..oo well their loss some time when they Operating System fails, and they loose all of their files :-D good job those of you that do bak up your stuff FREQUENTLY! cuz it may save you allot of stress someday! and lord knows some of you dont need it! (im just guessing there) ya know maybe your working..and the boss is a witch etc..

[michaelper22 0]

It's unfortunate but I almost never backed up. I really should because I have music, school work and other things that I would care if I lost. I haven't found any good solutions for backing up, so that's a major reason why I don't.