Take it from a programmer who lost seven days of criminal records. Take it from a game designer who tweaked version 1.0 one time too many. Take it from a Windows XP user who has no idea why Bill Gates likes to freeze PCs for no reason.

Just like living a healthy lifestyle requires discipline, you must develop good backup habits. You already know you should, but here is why you don't:

• Lazy (It's the number one killer of productivity)
• Busy (anaerobics are great, but don't neglect the cardio!)
• Over-Confident (sure, you're young, now)
• Clueless (you went to McDonald's again?)

However, ask yourself one question: what is easier to replace, contact information, or the 15,000 word article you spent two days researching?

Backup Fundamentals

As the previous question should make clear, different files have different anxiety levels attached to them. The first thing you should do is to decide whether it is more important to be able to replicate your current working environment or to be able to retrieve mission-critical files.

Replication

After a total computer failure, the ideal scenario would be to load a few CDs, punch a few buttons, wait about an hour and voil, your system is ready for you to resume work as if nothing had happened.

There are packages that you can purchase which claim to restore your PC to any particular point in the past. There are also systems for cloning your PC. This whole-earth approach, while effective, is so broad, that it is beyond the scope of this article. At any rate, you'll still need to recover individual files in a disaster. So, read on.

Mission-Critical Recovery

This dire-sounding phrase (which I made up, because it sounds techno-geek) simply means that you can retrieve your files even after a total disaster. Disasters include mechanical failure, theft, operator error (Oops!), fire, and believe it or not software upgrades.

Assuming you have decided to focus on mission-critical recovery, your next step is to decide whether the backup plan should revolve around your current working environment and habits, or whether you should adopt new organizational methods to facilitate backups. The choice is up to you. The only thing you should keep in mind is that, if the backup plan is too complicated, you're not going to bother.

On the one hand, if your work is scattered all over the hard drive and you elect to have a backup plan that revolves around this current plan, it will probably be a time-consuming task to not only set up the initial backup plan, but also to maintain it.

On the other hand, you may have the most efficient organization possible, but if you pair it with an arcane backup plan, you're probably going to decide it's too much trouble.

A Plan

In my experience, it has been helpful to take a middle road. My productivity is keyed to my organization, so I can't just scrap it. However, by researching backup plans and understanding the goals of each solution, I have been able to gradually evolve a plan that works for me. One thing I have never solved to my satisfaction is synchronizing files between workstations. If this is important to you, the best advice I can give is to treat your backup solution as if it were a network drive. This is imaginary, but it helps me to visualize being able to access my files from any computer.

Backups have to solve a host of problems in order to be useful:

• automatic
• archive
• restore
• catalogue and report
• compare
• recycle
• media-independent

Automatic

There is something comforting about knowing your files are backed up on a regular schedule. If you don't know how to set up task scheduling, it is a good skill to learn.

Archive

In today's gigabyte world, most backup solutions involve a second hard drive. Even if you can't imagine ever filling it up with backups, you have to remember, that hard drive is still a mechanical device, subject to failure. Unless it is offsite, it is also subject to the same disasters as the primary drive. You need to archive your backups to a more permanent medium, such as magnetic tape or CD-R.

After you have archived the data, you can reclaim the hard drive space on both drives.

You really should find a place outside of your home to store archives. Use your imagination. I've kept backups in a safe-deposit box!

Restore

This is obvious. The most annoying part of restore operations comes when you are attempting to retrieve a file without the original backup software. If the backup is in a popular format such as zip or tar, you may be able to retrieve the needed files. So, keep in mind that proprietary solutions are not the best solutions.

Another aspect of restoration involves the directory structure. Where should the restore file go? You may want to compare versions, so it would be a mistake to overwrite the version on your primary drive. The best solutions leave this choice up to you.

Catalogue and Report

What good is a backup if you can't find the file when you need it? My all-time favorite is a stand-alone product that has nothing to do with backups. It's called WhereIsIt and it can store a huge amount of information. No matter where I put a file, if I catalogued it with this package, it will tell me where it is. It has a powerful report generator that can provide all kinds of useful information about catalogued files. Here's how I use WhereIsIt. Every Saturday, I get a reminder from Outlook to run it. (I believe it has some kind of scripting language with which I could automate the task, but I never bothered. It's easy enough.) I click the backup button, select the external hard drive and the program does the rest! The catalogue resides on my primary drive for quick access.

Compare

There are many programs that will let you compare two versions of a file. Pick one that will do what you need. As a programmer, I find BeyondCompare to be indispensable. It compares folders to folders or files to files. It allows me to use a built-in FTP program to upload files from my hard drive to the web. (There's a plan!) The bonus for me is that BeyondCompare will synchronize folders. So, I have set it to automatically backup the contents of My Documents to the external hard drive. This is done once a night, using my infamous Tower of Hanoi backup scheme.

Recycle

You do not have unlimited resources to maintain backups indefinitely. At the least, you will run out of shelf space for your CD-Rs. Your cataloguing and report capabilities will become over-whelmed or, they will become so voluminous as to be nearly useless. In more severe instances, your backup media will become too small to hold the data.

Time is the final arbiter of the value of files on your hard drive. When the file is no longer needed, it can be deleted. This will keep it from taking up valuable backup space. However, determining how long to keep archives is more problematic. When I worked at the police department, the CD-Rs were kept for thirty days and then shredded. This was a simple decision, because every backup was a full backup.

Media-Independent

Remember 100MB Iomega Zip disks? As a replacement for floppy disks, these media were the perfect bridge between miniscule storage and expensive (at the time) compact disc technology. However, the computer world continued to scale up its storage demands and the 100MB became as futile as the floppy. A good backup solution should be flexible enough to write to any medium. In addition, the files should be recoverable even without the presence of the original backup software. In other words, proprietary solutions may not be suitable for mission-critical recovery.

Of course, we don't live in a perfect world. The best backup solution for me is the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium USB key. It has 512MB of storage and several proprietary packages for backing up my critical files. I am willing to put up with it because I don't rely solely on the key. At 512MB, it is wholly inadequate to be my primary backup solution.

My media-independent solution is ZipBackup. As the name implies, it creates the popular zip file format. I have many choices between full, incremental and differential backups. With task scheduling, I run this program four times a day.

Information Overload!

You don't need all that stuff. I do. I am not a freelance writer. You are not a programmer (if you are, you need all that stuff!)

The preceding information just helps you to get a grip on the scope of the wonderful world of backups. Now that you have the background, you can wipe all the minutiae from your short-term memory and focus on the following:

If you are using a PC with drag and drop capabilities, you can backup your work!

You spend all day on your computer. I don't know if you have any idea that you can drag a folder to the icon for your cd writer. It's not the easiest way to do things, but it works.

A better way to do this (Windows XP) is to select the files, right-click and highlight Send To and choose the cd writer. You can go all over the hard drive, right-clicking and sending files until you have all of them waiting to go. Then, just follow the wizard's instructions.

After a couple of days of this drudgery, you may decide to rearrange your file organization to accommodate this new right-click backup solution.

At that point, you're well on your way to understanding the problems and rewards of backing up.