Posts Tagged ‘Backup File’

Wonderful Ways to Have a Handy Backup of Your Files

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

James Fohl is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the best online backup software — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/wonderful-ways-to-have-a-handy-backup-of-your-files.html

Wonderful Ways to Have a Handy Backup of Your Files

Do you always want to carry a handy backup copy of your website, photos or music collection? Let’s face it, some users want to have the ability to have a backup copy of their files so that they can show their friends their latest photos wherever they maybe. Whether it’s at an internet cafe or the local library, a lot of people wishing they had their files don’t because carrying around a large CD-R just isn’t very handy.

Luckily, the recent years have lead to an explosion in handy little ways to allow you to always be able to carry a backup of your files.

First off are the little flash memory sticks that are being produced by literally every computer company on the face of the earth. Most are smaller than a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, but have the ability to store tons of data. Talk about handy!

Handy flash memory based keychains starting at around fifteen dollars are perfect storage mediums for backup files.

Starting at around fifteen dollars, a user can go out and buy a 128 megabyte memory keychain. Plug it into your computer’s USB port and boom; easy access to your files.

Since the memory keychains utilize the USB port for their power, users do not need to worry about carrying a power pack, or replacing batteries. The small flash memory units are extremely handy because you can literally take your backup files anywhere you go. If you are saying to yourself that 128 megabytes is simply not enough for your backup file, then continue to read on.

The handy size of the keychains allow users access to gigabytes of space for their backup files.

In under the size of a pack of gum, flash memory keychains exist that have the ability to store gigabytes of data. Not just megabytes, but gigabytes. Although one gigabyte units start at fifty dollars, they are extremely handy when compared with large CD-R discs.

Business card sized CD-Rs are another handy media for transporting backups of your files.

If you are against the whole flash media brigade for whatever reason, and wish to stay with good old CD-Rs, then business card CD-Rs are for you.

Business card CD-Rs are handy little CDs that are kept in a small protective case the size of a business card. While they can easily be stored in a wallet, they have a limit of around fifty megabytes for your backup files.

Also, users utilizing the handy sized CD-R discs for their backup needs should also be very cautious about using the media in their CD drives. A lot of CD burners, as well as normal CD-ROM units do not support the disc. Always check the manual of your CD-ROM drive to see if it supports business card sized CDs, otherwise you may loose your disc in the unit.

While business card CD-Rs ultimately look cool, they just aren’t as handy as flash based memory keychains. While the keychains are more expensive, they are more durable, have much more space for your backup needs, and are supported in a lot more computer systems than the card CD-R counterparts.

read the full article

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Computer Help | No Comments »

Home Data Backup in Windows XP

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the best online backup software — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/home-data-backup-in-windows-xp.html

Possible Problems with Windows XP Data Backup Facility

The data backup facility in Windows XP is developed by Veritas, and works reasonably well on a small scale. It is very basic and has next to nothing in terms of whistles and bells, which is the root of its potential drawbacks. It has no media spanning; the ability to copy the data backup file to more than one disk, or whatever your preferred media is. If you are copying only your data file this is probably not going to be a problem, if you want to copy the whole drive it may be.

A second problem is that XP data backups are not compatible with Windows 98. If this is a problem, because you have some old data backups for instance, there is a way around it – you buy the commercial version from Veritas.

Another problem that some may find is doing a complete backup on a PC with no floppy drive. As a complete backup includes creating a recovery disk, it will return an error if there is no drive to create it on.

Deciding What to Put into Your Data Backup

Deciding what files to put into your data backup will decide whether you can use the XP data backup. If you have the installation disks from all of your applications you can get away with backing up only your data files, almost all of which are stored by default in My Documents making life very simple. You might also want to backup the registry, and you should beware of applications that store their files in dedicated, non-My Documents folders. The ones to watch are anything that works on text or graphics files.

Using Windows XP Data Backup

You will find it by going through Start/Control Panel/Performance and Maintenance, and you will see ‘Backup your data’.

If this is your first time, a wizard will appear, giving you two options. The simplest to decide is wether you want to ‘Always Start in Wizard Mode’. The easy answer is yes, but if you feel confident uncheck it. The other option is ‘Advanced Mode’ that not surprisingly offers more options.

Following the Wizard by clicking next gives two options, backup or restore. Since we are doing a data backup the choice is obvious. You now get four options of what to back up, select ‘My Documents’ unless you have reason not to, and click next. The next screen asks where you want the backup to go; the default is the desktop. Go with this. If you select ‘Finish’ now you will get a default backup.

You will see an Advanced button here, clicking this allows you to choose which folders to copy, whether it is a normal, copy, differential, incremental, or daily backup with explanations of the differences, and the options for verifying – always select this! – and volume shadow copy that allows files in use to be copied. Next you get the option to append or replace existing files, and finally run now or later.

read the full article

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Computer Help | No Comments »

Why Should a Small Business Spend Time and Money on Data Backups?

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup solution — Back2zip. This article is also at http://free-backup.info/small-business-spend-time-money-data-backups.html

What is a Data Backup and Why is It Necessary?

Data backup is as important as the data you store on your system; if that holds valuable information critical to the daily operation of your business, then making a backup of it is also critical. Think about the customer information, supplier details, debtors & creditors, etc. stored on your hard drive, and then imagine that one morning you can no longer find them.

Backups are for your peace of mind, and to save you a lot of time and money if anything terminal happens to your data files. Your data is fundamental to the operation of your business, and should be valued as an important asset.

Any backup is basically copying your data files to disk or some other storage device, to provide a working copy of your data ready to be restored if the original copy is lost, damaged, or corrupted. This can can occur in a surprising number of ways – viruses, power failures, power spikes (these may not even be noticed! ), system crashes, external events such as flood, fire, theft, or vandalism , or even a simple user error.

A Sample Data Backup Procedure

How often you make a data backup depends on how frequently the data changes, the value you place on the information, its importance to your business, and the cost of replacing or recreating it. If you consider that your data file is too important to lose, or that it would be costly to replace, then you must backup regularly.

If you open and update your data files every day, you should set aside a labeled disk/tape for each day of the week and make a backup everday. The following week, when you next enter the backup file name, you will be prompted to overwrite or append the previous weeks file. If you overwrite, you will then be in a weekly cycle. If you are confident that you will always have space on the media, you can append and have a two weekly cycle.

If you feel your information doesn’t alter that frequently, you can backup once a week and rotate disks on that basis – Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, back to Week 1 again.

The ultimate system is to keep buying new media, backing up daily and working on a very long (6 monthly or more) cycle. This is to ensure that there is always a clean backup if a fault goes unnoticed for any length of time, but it is really overkill for a small business.

Don’t Forget to Check That Your Data Backup Has Worked!

Don’t be misled into thinking that because you have run a backup that it has worked, there are numerous horror stories of PC users suddenly needing to restore and only then finding out that their backup procedure has been routinely failing. You should regularly test the backup media to confirm that the data has been successfully backing up.

Don’t put off learning how to recover files until disaster strikes. Practice to familiarize yourself with the process and make this a regular event, especially after any upgrades or changes.

read the full article

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Computer Help | No Comments »

Alternatives to Tape Backup

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

James Fohl is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular tool for online backup and recovery — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/alternatives-to-tape-backup.html

Alternatives to Tape Backup

While tape backup systems have been in use for the past twenty years, the amount of use such systems have had has been increasingly winding down. Reasons for this range from the slow speed of tape backup devices, to the overall reliability of the devices.

While tape backup systems have different capacities ranging from ten megabytes to ten gigabytes and beyond, the fact remains that they are incredibly slow, not exactly the most reliable way to store computer data, and increasingly difficult to locate.

Creating a backup of ten gigabytes to a tape drive can take several hours. Not only that, but tapes can easily be damaged by magnetic waves, such as those found in metal detectors. With such a slow transfer speed and potential data loss problem, don’t you think you should look into tape backup alternatives?

External hard drives are now available with large amounts of backup space, and speeds that traditional tape systems can not compare to.

First off, external hard drives now have wonderful capacities. You can easily gain access to an external drive capable of two hundred gigabytes of storage space. Using an external hard drive for backup purposes is not just safer, but also much, much faster. An external hard drive can easily connect to a system via USB 2.0, Firewire, or even through a network connection. All three of these connection methods will result in file transfers that are many times faster than a traditional tape backup.

Besides external hard drives, you can always look into purchasing backup file servers. With these servers, you can easily add several large hard drives to the backup file server to easily allow many backups to be created.

External hard drives and file servers cost more than tape backup hardware, however they are more reliable and faster.

While purchasing servers and extra hard drives cost a lot more than traditional tape backup systems, they are far more reliable, and as mentioned before literally hundreds of times faster.

While magnetic tape backup systems are still essential for very large corporations, smaller institutes requiring backups of smaller amounts of data are better off to stick with external hard drives or backup file servers.

Home users do not really need tape backup solutions for their data when optical devices such as DVD and CD burners exist.

For home users dealing with large files, tape backup options are not necessary for you. DVD burners offer users an impressive 4.7 gigabytes of space on each blank DVD-R. This is plenty of space for home users, and a great option since you can buy a complete spindle of DVD-R discs for the same price a user would pay for one piece of tape backup media.

While it may seem like the day of tape backup systems have come to pass, the truth is several corporations still rely on tape backup systems for their backup needs. As hard drive technology continues to improve, perhaps some day the price of external hard drives will rival the price of tape backup cartridges.

read the full article

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Computer Help | No Comments »