A Backup Plan Is a Good Idea
Life is more important than data, but the events of Sept.11 serve as a reminder to protect sensitive information.
There are many elaborate ways to back up your system, but it doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Some methods are relatively painless.
For starters, you don’t need to back up the software and operating system from your PC’s hard drive. Instead, make sure you have your original distribution CDs and, if you have access to a CD burner (CD-R or CD-RW drive), copy those CDs and store the copies away from your computer.
Copyright law allows you to make such copies as long as you don’t share them with others. If your hard drive crashes completely--as mine did last week--you’ll have what you need to rebuild your system.
Reinstalling all of your software is an inconvenience but not a disaster. If your PC doesn’t have a CD burner, you can buy an internal one for as little as $100. External Universal Serial Bus CD-RW drives start at about $200.
A CD burner is an excellent way to back up data. CD-R discs can store as much as 700 megabytes. That might not sound like much compared with the size of your hard drive, but--with the exception of photos, music and video files--PC data files aren’t that big.
I have thousands of back columns, several books and other files (mostly Microsoft Word) on my hard drive, and they all fit on a single CD along with all my financial records for the last 10 years. My collection of digital photos, however, takes up more than 3 gigabytes.
Most CD burners work with CD-RW discs that can be erased or updated. These discs are more expensive and harder to use than the write-once CD-R discs, which can be found for as little as 30 cents each.
The whole idea of a backup is to have a permanent archival copy. So you’re better off burning a new CD-R every week or so than updating a CD-RW. Besides, that will give you multiple generations of backups, which is a good idea anyway.
Often, the most important document to back up is the one you’re working on now. When I have work in progress that I need to protect, I simply e-mail it to myself or someone else even if I’m not finished with it. AOL, for example, stores files on its servers for at least a few days, so I just leave it in my AOL mailbox. That’s not the case with all ISPs and e-mail programs.
The last thing most of us can afford to lose is our financial records. I use Quicken and, periodically, I use WinZip to compress all the data files into a single file that I put on a floppy disk and mail to my accountant’s office. For security, all personal finance programs let you password-protect your data.
Although I recommend that you keep a backup off site, it’s not a bad idea to have one close at hand. QPS, at https://www.qps-inc.com, offers a series of external FireWire drives starting at about $179 that come with Dantz Retrospect Express backup software, which can be scheduled to automatically back up your files or your entire drive to an external drive or a CD-R disc. NTI’s $79 Backup Now is easier to use but backs up only to its proprietary file format.
Another service, @Backup (https://www.backup.com), has a system that’s relatively foolproof. For $49.95 a year, the service automatically backs up as much as 50MB of data over the Internet to the company’s secure servers. Every night, the system backs up any files I’ve created or modified during the day.
If you have a laptop and a desktop, you can synchronize files between the two machines via a local area network or by connecting them with the cables that come with PCSync or FastLynx file transfer software. If either machine gets lost, stolen or broken, everything is backed up to the other.
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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard between 2 and 3 p.m. weekdays on the KNX-AM (1070) Technology Hour. He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com.
