 |
How to Back up all my Junk??
by The F@t Guy
|
|---|
   |
Backing up - Drive to Drive Syncronization |
|
Backing Up... No really, I mean it this time, How to perform the backup: If you are looking to back up to DVD or CD-ROM, you can skip this section as CD-ROMs and DVDs need a special burning software to function. I will be talking about that next. All the other methods described herein use a live drive-to-drive copy routine as I will talk about now: If you are using a removable media (floppy, zip, external drive, or Thumb drive), it must be "plugged in" and you must be able to see it and access it from Windows Explorer. If you are backing up across a LAN the drive may need to be shared. In all cases the media you are backing to must not be write-protected, and you must have writing priviledges, passwords, and permission to access the drive (if you can function as an Administrator, you have the needed permissions and priviledges). You must be sure the drive you are backing to is big enough to hold the data as described above. After all that, it is really pretty easy: In Windows Explorer, get to where your data is, highlight the things you want to back up, R-Click => Copy. Now go to your backup drive, R-Click anywhere on the background of the drive, and select "paste" Sit back and watch it go. Kinda anti-climactic, huh? That is about as easy as it gets, but that ain't all: Backing Up Across Drives -Syncronizing and Backup Utilities: Syncronizing Utilities: Believe it or not, you can run into a condition where some of the files on the backup are newer than the ones on the machine- Especially if you are backing multiple machines to the same backup store. How do you tell whether to overwrite a file or not? This is done with a syncronizing utility. As a matter of fact, I prefer to use a syncronizing utility most of the time anyway. Explorer is horribly slow, and subject to fits in Win98. A sync-capable file manager is normally much quicker and more sure-footed during file copy jobs. These filemanagers usually show two directories side-by-side which is very nice for copy work- just put the right side in your MyDocs and the left side in your backup drive and you can drag-and-drop your way to backup nirvana. the "sync" part comes from a line of symbols that show which file is newer/older, present/not present that runs down the middle or down each side of the window. Other than that, they all function more-or-less like Windows Explorer. My all-time-favorite of these is a little gizmo called FastLynx by Sewell. It has amazing capabilities. Another old favorite is called Fastmove! 2000 (now unsupported, though still available for purchase). This one is very easy to understand, with big yellow and blue arrows showing which direction the files need to go. But even with a syncronizing file manager it is still possible to make a huge mistake- One must be very conscious of one's actions: As an instance, suppose you have a laptop and a desktop. Suppose also that you have just returned from the road and all your newest stuff is in the laptop. You get home, tired from your day, you set your laptop down and go sit in your chair to quaff a beverage and watch the news. Suddenly, the telephone rings. It is your boss returning a phone call from earlier and he needs a number for one of your clients. Since your laptop is still all put away, you just walk over to the up-and-running desktop, open Outlook and find the number for him... Whether you know it or not, you just caused your desktop's Outlook database file to be newer than the one on your laptop! If you were to just hook up the machines and automatically shove things around, you would overwrite the laptop file with the desktop file, so be very careful until you understand just how this works! Automated Backup Utilities: Automated backup utilities work just about like a syncronizing file manager- except there is no file manager part. These just perform a set copy "job" at an appointed time- generally copying only the newer files from one place to the other. One sets up the "job" and tells the utility when to run, and away it goes, with barely a note to you that the process is underway. While these utilities can be set up to syncronize, I would really only recommend them for backup routines, leaving the syncronizing for a manual effort... But for backup, wow! My favorite tool for this is a little freeware called Karen's Replicator . This is the little wonder I back up all my stuff with. it is simple, fast, and light-weight, and best off all, it will copy across networks without mapping the drives. Excellent, excellent tool. Like most back-up utilities, you create a "job", pick the "source folder", pick the "destination folder", set up a time schedule and tell it "ok"... the next time the schedule rolls around, the gizmo will automatically come up and run the job. It is good to watch it the first few times, looking for errors, or for files that will not copy, adjusting the "ignore" list to trim up the stuff you don't need... but once "broken in", it is pretty well "set it and forget it". One small note of caution though: Files cannot be copied if they are currently in use- so be sure to turn off Outlook, Quickbooks, and etcetera (any program that is using the data you are trying to back up), or the files will not be copied. As I have said elsewhere, if using an automated backup routine, it is of paramount concern that one does not "set it and forget it" too much. You must make certain that it is doing it's job, or when you least expect it, you may find yourself without the backups you were relying on- Perhaps another startup program has locked your backup program out, or perhaps it just broke- Hard to tell what might happen, so be careful and sure... there is no guarantee beyond your own watchfulness. |
