Chapter 9: Backing Up Your Files with the Backup Utility
Backing Up a Few Files or Folders Even if you can't get around to a complete backup, you can protect yourself against the worst without too much effort by backing up your most valuable files and folders each day that you work on them.
Copying Files onto a Floppy Disk Even on a slow system, it usually takes only a minute or two at the end of each day to pop in a floppy and copy the files you worked on that day. It's a good habit to develop.
If you typically work on only a few files each day, follow these steps:
- Put a blank floppy disk into drive A: (the floppy drive).
- Run Windows Explorer (choose Start | My Computer).
- If the folder tree doesn't appear in the left pane of the Explorer window, click the Folders button on the toolbar.
- Find the files you want to back up.
- Drag-and-drop the files onto the floppy drive in the folder tree. Or, select the files, choose File | Send To (or right-click the file and choose Send To from the menu that appears), and choose your floppy drive from the list of Send To destinations that appears.
If you work on a larger number of files, search for recentlychanged files to make sure that you don't miss any. Choose Start | Search to search for all files modified within the last day. You can drag-and-drop files directly out of the Search Results window onto a floppy disk icon in Windows Explorer. Or you can right-click any file in the Search Results window and choose Send To from the menu.
If you use Search to list the files you've worked on today, construct your search in such a way as to avoid finding all the temporary files that Windows creates in the course of a day. (If you do a lot of Web browsing, there can be hundreds of them.) These temporary files are contained in subfolders of the C:\Windows folder (or whatever folder Windows is installed in).
Copying Files onto Larger Drives Anything you can copy onto a floppy, you can also copy onto a writable CD, a Zip drive or other removable disk, a second hard drive, or another machine on your LAN. You can drag-and-drop the files to these media in the same way you copy files to floppies. If the drive (or folder) that you use for storing backup copies isn't already available on the Send To menu, you can add it.
A larger backup drive makes it less important to be selective about what you copy. A Zip disk is approximately 70 times larger than a floppy, and a backup hard drive may be dozens of times larger yet. You probably can copy, without too much time or trouble, your entire documents folder (whether it is C:\My Documents or some other folder that you have chosen) at the end of each day. You probably can copy your entire e-mail folder as well.
