Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application that features support for various complex calculations, graphing, VBA programming etc. Microsoft Excel 2003 and earlier versions use .xls extension to store data in their files, while Microsoft Excel 2007 uses .xlsx as its proprietary file format. These files get corrupted due to reasons like Microsoft Office corruption, addons, virus etc. So, if you don’t have updated data backup, Excel Recovery solutions can provide key to repair and restore damaged Excel files and recover all lost information.
Posts Tagged ‘Data Backup’
Home Data Backup in Windows XP
Saturday, June 13th, 2009Andrew 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.
Why Should a Small Business Spend Time and Money on Data Backups?
Monday, June 8th, 2009Andrew 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.
Microsoft’s View of Window 2000 Backup
Sunday, June 7th, 2009Kalb 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/microsofts-view-of-window-2000-backup.html
What Microsoft Says about Window 2000 Backup
Window 2000 backup is a topic that Microsoft discussed thoroughly on their Technet website. The deployment of Window 2000 systems and the backup of those systems is discussed as well as restore processes connected to those backup plans. Backup is the number one focus for most data centers and any data rich environment. Why? Because data is king and business revolves around the data it generates and the data it collects.
Data sells and the selling it needs to be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This requirement pushes the envelope of Window 2000 systems as much as any other operating systems. Detailed planning and effective process design are at the core of great data backup and restore plans.
The Need for Window 2000 Backup
An organization’s operations can generate huge amounts of data to be stored electronically. Trends show this to increase continuously and to require more and more storage media and planning to contain the flow of data. Finding ways to protect this data effectively and not destroy the processes needed to acquire the data in the first place is a huge challenge. Regulations and insurance requirements call for the retention and archiving of much of this data.
These requirements stretch the capabilities of a data center system. Window 2000 addresses these issues with products to assist in the backup process.
The Challenge for a Window 2000 Backup
Traditional backup and recovery plans are not able to respond to the new challenges that require uninterrupted application access and no downtime for backup. To add an extra challenge, more and more data centers are being geographically dispersed creating a headache when it comes time to centralize the backup.
The frequent backup needed in order to protect data requires a juggling of needs and processes and brings even more challenges. How do you make sure your backup is in real time? And how do you get those files to backup when the application has them open at backup time? And how do you make sure only the latest updated files are being backed up and not the files that are already archived, shouldn’t they be removed and stored?
And is everyone on the same page across the board or is someone harboring data that was removed from the current backup two months ago? Window 2000 backup suggestions are outlined on the Technet website with questions and backup outline to use as a skeleton beginning for a backup plan.
Assessing Window 2000 Backup
Assessing your own organization is the place to start. Consider all kinds of failure when you design your backup plan. Any system architecture you choose should be based on defined system requirements. Microsoft suggests that in a Window 2000 system this architecture should take into consideration the configuration and contents of every server and the capability each has. It should define very clearly what technologies are required for the successful use of the backup and restore plan created.
