Whats a back up and why do i need it?

Just curious. Heard a few people at the mall talking about it but didn't get it. From what i heard slip a blank disc in, do this and do that and keep the disc in case xp goes tits up, right? Can someone shed light on how to do this? Thanks.

 

A backup is a copy of your important files, or of your entire hard drive contents, on another, separate form of media (various types of tape, or CD, or DVD, etc.).

If your hard drive fails, you will have a copy of your important stuff somewhere else that you can use to restore to a new hard drive. Or if your operating system becomes so corrupt that it has to be reinstalled, and so forth.

Most operating systems also will guide you through an initial creation of "recovery disks", which contain important operating system files that can allow you to boot your computer up (from disk) if it won't boot otherwise.

There are many ways to do backups -- different hardware and software packages. You can have a tape drive attached to your computer, which runs automatic backups on whatever schedule you set it (daily, weekly, etc.).

You can do a "poor man's backup" just by burning your important stuff onto CD-ROMs.

 

HeddaLora is correct. If your computer has a CD-RW +/- drive, use CD-RW discs for your back up media. Suppose you are a college student and working on a report. We will name our file report.doc. This report you have been workin on for three weeks. It only exists in one location -- the my documents folder on your computer (local hard drive). We will assume you never saved the file to a floppy disk or any other media. Your worst nightmare happens -- the system goes tits up. Now you are two days away from the report deadline and all your work is lost. Had you had a back-up (a copy), you could continue your work at a campus computer until yours gets repaired.

Note: The value placed on backup data depends on how current it is. Important files should be backed up routinely.

 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads3.html is the MajorGeeks link to lots of backup programs. Choice of backup program and method of backup is a personal thing. I like to do a full backup to another hard drive and a cumulative backup to another partition on C; drive. Baz

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