Alan Danbury - PC
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Help Pages - Security tips when using
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Backups
When all else fails and your PC does
get infected with a virus or
trojan, or when you have a hardware failure, one essential item will be
your installation disks and backups of your files. Armed with these,
you can rebuild your PC and restore it to the state it was, except
without the viruses.
Keep safe any disks that came with
your PC, and any software that you
have purchased separately. If you have bought software over the
Internet and downloaded the install files, make sure you keep a copy of
the file somewhere. Most modern PCs have CD or DVD writers, and
spending a little time setting up regular backups will be well worth
while. Backup software is included in most recent Operating Systems, or
there are free alternatives readily available.
Remember, back it up or lose it!
What
should I back up?
If you have your original program
disks and operating system disks (and
the licence keys), all you should need to backup regularly is
your
data. These days, most of your data is stored in "My Documents", but it
is worth checking if anything is stored elsewhere. A simple but
effective backup routine would create a full copy of your data on a
regular basis (weekly or monthly depending on how frequently files
change), and an incremental copy on a more frequent basis. For
example, you might do a full backup of My Documents on the first of the
month, with an incremental backup each Monday. Then, if you had a
failure, you would have to restore the full backup and the latest
incremental one to get you back to last Monday.
How
do I do a backup?
If you are running Windows XP Pro,
Start, Run, NTBACKUP. Click on the
Backup wizard and follow the instructions. In case of hard disk
failure, you should not just backup your files to the same hard disk,
either fit a second hard disk and use that for the backup files, or
copy them off to CD/DVD. If the data is really important, consider
keeping the CD/DVD well away from your computer, perhaps even at a
friend's house. A backup is no use if is either stolen or destroyed in
a fire along with the PC.
If you are
running Windows XP Home, NTBACKUP is not installed by default. You can
install it from your Windows CD, you will find the installer in the
\ValueAdd\MSFT folder.
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