Fatal Crash!It’s a good job our cars don’t act like our computers!This may have happened to you. You have been working away for
months on your computer and never experienced anything more serious that the
occasional computer crash – where you’ve had to re-boot. Then one day, you
switch or re-boot your machine and you get that gut-wrenching screen that
states, “Operating System Not Found” – you’re hard drive had gone together with
all the files that you’ve worked so hard to produce. This is exactly what
happened to me a few years go and I had nothing backed up! I learned a hard
lesson about backing up my work. OK, I got over it, most of us do – but what a
shame it has to happen in the first place. Now, I have installed a second drive that I save all my files to. My main (C drive) is only used for the operating system and my installed programs. On top of this I have an external drive and my very important files are also backed up to DVD. One thing about DVD disk is that up to 4.7 GB can be stored on one disk Using software, I can also back up my entire operating system set-up exactly the way it is now, but that is something I’ve never really bothered about, because in the event of having to re-install everything on a new hard drive, I will tweak my set-up as I start work again. One thing I’ve found very important is that I save all downloaded programs – i.e. the installer (the installer name generally ends in .exe) to a folder on my drive and then back them up on a DVD or CD. As I do this, I write the name of the .exe installer, the program it will install and it’s license key in a notebook. A mistake I made in the past taught me this with a free video-editing program that came with my DVD burner. I had the disk in the box, but had lost the license key. It had probably been thrown out with the trash at some time. Anyway, that software is useless to me now without the license key, but I’m hanging on to it, just in case one day I may find the license key written down somewhere that I’ve I put away safely. Too safely! These days, a back-up program makes my task a lot easier.Back-up premium ($39/£21.77), is well worth the peace of mind it can bring having the capability of backing up your valuable files to hard drive, disks, network drives, and ftp servers that are getting very popular these days. (FTP means File Transfer Protocol – this is a remote computer that can receive files from your computer via the Internet). If you have an internet account, you will more than likely have some free webspace you can use for storage as well as a website if you have one. All you will need is the correct Server Address (available on your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) website, your user name and password. Then using a program such as Back-up premium, you can upload your back-up, keeping it safe from any viruses or other nasties that manage to get on to your computer. But you should have fully up-to-date anti-virus software and firewall. Yes?
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