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Good News - Bad News

The bad news is - your computer is a machine, and like all machines it will break sooner or later. Often, this will take the form of data loss from a virus or hard drive crash. The good news is - a competent data recovery specialist can probably get most of it back for you. The bad news is - it's expensive. The good news is - with Micro-Scope you can rebuild your Master Boot Record yourself and often the FAT as well. The bad news is - rebuilding the FAT can be time-consuming and is not effective 100% of the time. The good news is - with frequent scheduled backups, you don't have to worry too much about any of this.

Actually, as a technician you are likely well aware of the need for backups, but if you work for a small company or do free-lance repair your customers or bosses may not be. It's your job to educate them, before they have a hard-drive crash while doing the yearly taxes!

Fortunately, making backups is less of a headache than it used to be. Windows 95 and 98 have a free tool under Accessories\System Tools, appropriately enough called Backup. It's gone in Windows ME, 2000 and XP but there is a somewhat similar program called System Restore. The Backup program makes backing up so simple, the only questions are: how often, how much and to what media.

To answer these questions, look at how often the data changes and how damaging it would be to lose it. If a database gets new customer information daily that would be impossible to replace, then it makes sense to back up that data every night. In other situations, once a week might be enough. The important thing is to work out a realistic schedule and then follow it!

These scheduled backups can be just of the files that change regularly, but there should also be one backup of the entire drive so you can recover system configuration data, hardware settings, customized software preferences, Internet bookmarks and so forth. That way if your system does crash you won't spend days getting things back the way you like them. And don't forget to make a new backup of the drive whenever you have accumulated extensive system changes.

Now, about media. If the files are small enough, the regular backups can be done to floppy diskettes, but with larger files or anything with graphics you'll probably need a zip drive. For very large amounts of data, the usual choice for cost and reliability is magnetic tape. Tape will also work in most cases for that one-time backup of the entire drive, although for convenience and speed nothing beats just backing up to another hard drive. And with prices coming down on large-capacity drives, sometimes it even costs less than tape.