Part 1 Email Maintenance Part 2 Protect Part 3 Update Part 4 Clean up Part 5 Backup

Part 5: Backup

For those of you blessed with CD burners in your computers (or CDRWs), backing up will be very simple (and you probably have already done this).

Put a blank CD in your computer, hold down the windows key and tap the “e” key which will open the Windows Explorer window as seen here. Now drag the My Documents icon down to the CDRW drive icon.

To Restore these files (or just one of them) the file from the CD to your hard drive. To use the file normally, you will need to right mouse click on the file – click on Properties and uncheck the Read-only box.

If your computer does not have a CD burner, then you have to use an alternative. The easiest, but longest method, would be a whole lot of floppy disks. In the example on the left, you would click on the word My Computer in the left side of the screen. That will change the right side of the screen into a list of files. Across the top of the screen click on View and then click on the word Details. You will see titles in the first column and numbers in the second column. Although you can drag each file one at a time to the left onto the words “3 ˝ Floppy [A:]”, an easier way would be to click once on the first file and then holding down the shift key, tap the down arrow key to highlight more and more files. At the bottom of the screen you will see a number getting larger. Your goal is 1.30MB (a floppy will hold 1.38MB but it is good to leave some room).

If you have individual files larger than 1.30MB or you realize it will take too MANY floppies to backup, then you might want to look at some other options.

Flashdrives (sometimes called “USB drives” or “thumbdrives”) are now becoming quite inexpensive. They are easy to use and only require a USB port on your computer. You can find them at any office supply store, home electronic stores, department store, or even the computer supply section of any drug store.

If you have high speed internet access, another new option is storing your files online. If you have a Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail or other web-based email account, you may not realize you have 250MB of storage.

Although this is meant for email storage, you CAN use it by emailing yourself with an attachment - just make sure that each attachment is under 10MB. I did this for this article by creating zip file of my folder with tips articles and attaching it to an email to myself. If you would like a Gmail (Google Mail) account just for storage, contact me as I can invite 50 friends to open their own account. Gmail allows 1 GB of storage (that's 1000 MB or close to 1000 floppies). Just make sure that each attachment is under 10MB.

Another option is the card reader. Anyone with a digital camera might be very interested in this option. It plugs into a USB port and uses

the same small cards that are in your digital camera. If you own a card reader and more than one card for your camera, you can use one for taking pictures and one for backing up. A little known fact is that you can also use the same card for both. Who would think of looking on your camera for your sensitive backup files?

The last lesson in backing up is RESTORING the files when you need to. In almost all these methods, you plug in your device and it should look like another hard drive. Back to the first graphic, just drag and drop from the new drive back to your My Documents folder.

 

For more details (Mac users click here or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

 

up.

 

Michael Shalkey

Part 1 Email Maintenance
Part 2 Protect your Computer from Viruses and Spyware
Part 3 Update Windows and your programs
Part 4 Cleanup in preparation for Backup
Part 5 Backup (and Restore)