Backups - Why Bother?

This week's article takes a look at the whys and wherefores of making backups.

Why bother with backups?

If you think about all the time you have spent creating documents, tailoring your system to work the way you want and the amount of effort spent in installing software and getting it working, you can see that if all this was lost, you would have a major task on your hands putting it all back together again!

I don't know about you, but doing work once is enough for me and I really don't want to re-enter that 4,000 word report I just typed up! Trouble is, backups take time to do and I really can't be bothered — or can I?

Well, speaking from personal experience, I am glad to say that I take regular backups and I have had cause to put a tape in and do a restore! It happens to all of us at one time or another — we delete a file by mistake or that latest piece of hardware we installed has messed things up!

It is sometimes far easier just restore things back to their former glory!

OK, so we need to take regular backups, but what and how? See the next section establishing a backup procedure!

Establishing a Backup Procedure

Here, we need to think about two things. What are we going to backup and how are we going to do it?

What are we going to back up?

This depends upon the backup device at our disposal. If you have a tape drive, then I'd recommend that you back up everything. If you only have a floppy disk drive, then just back up your files and program settings. For floppy disk users, I'd suggest (at least) the following list:

• All files that you create (wordprocessor files, databases, spreadsheets, graphics etc.)

• All .INI files (these contain your settings for how programs work the way you want them to)

• All .GRP files (these contain your program groups — and are still present in Windows 95)

• Your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files (these set your system up to run)

• Any device drivers (like MSCDEX.COM, MOUSE.SYS)

There may be other things that you need, depending on your setup, but back up everything that cannot be installed from software installation disks (so you may need to backup downloaded programs and files too)

How are we going to backup?

Having established what we want to backup, we now need to consider how to back it up. In this instance, I am not referring to the backup software but the type of backup procedure we want to follow.

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