Doing a backup of your computer hard drive
Did you know your favourites and outlook email and address books are not in My Documents folder?
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In 7 years I have lost about 3 hard drives. I have also been unlucky enough to loose my computer backups at the same time, but this system should help you to not make the same mistakes that I have. If I could sum up what I have lost by not having hard copies of backups of hard drives (including a web server), you might want to cry for me. 80 websites and all the code / software, 7 years worth of emails (except year 2002 for some bizarre reason), 7 years worth of data collection (around 20,000 qualified email addresses), hundreds of personal photographs and images. This kind of loss can also make you loose your mind!
Lots of people regularly backup their pc collecting their "my documents" file and burning it to a disc or putting it into an external drive. This however is not sufficient if you have your email stored on your computer or you have spent a long time setting up your pc to be how you like it including your favourites and cookies.
I discovered about the favourites and emails when my hard drive went and I took my pc to be repaired and had a backup of my computer documents. As I said, and I can not stress it enough - I lost 7 years of emails and contacts, and my favourites were like my own little internet world! This
devastated
my business.
Backing up email like outlook
The address of the website on the internet
If you use an email service that collects the emails and stores them on your pc - like outlook or outlook express, when you go into outlook and do a backup, the email is backed up by default to a folder in Documents and Settings.
Doing your outlook email backup (correct in Sept 06)
1 - Open outlook and select File, Import Export,
2 - Select in the list, Export to a file.
3 - Scroll down list and select "personal folder file .pst" file type (as this saves all your address book and emails).
4 - Then select the folders you want to save (I would choose all and select sub folders),
5 - Then I normally choose to not export duplicate items.
6 - Then click finish.
7 - One the file is there, you can create a file in your My Documents called Backup, and copy that file located usually here C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\backup.pst into the backup folder.
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TIP - It is wise to make a note of all the folders you need to collect data from to do your backup.
Backing up favourites
Similar to outlook .pst file, you can just go to here C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Favourites and copy the file into your backup folder in my documents.
Backing up your documents
Mostly your general documents including your photos and music are here C:\My Documents or here C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents. However, not all of mine are - so it is a good idea to watch as you save things to your pc if you download a lot of things, see where they go. My music files for example go to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\. Just remember to copy things into your backup folder, then back them up do disc.
TIP - If you are backing up to disc - CHECK IT. Make sure it burned properly, and that you can access al the files on it. I had a backup disc and found it to be blank when I went to restore it all.
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Backing up cookies
Similar to outlook .pst file and favourites, you can just go to here C:\Documents and Settings\USERNMAME\Cookies and copy the file into your backup folder in my documents.
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Backing up business
Now this bit I guess is relating to my own business, as I run websites. If I put you a bit in the picture, you can see how easy it can be to loose control of your business, and not have access to your own business.
I had 80 web sites - to be fair, a lot of them were total rubbish, or one page but a few, around 5 were decent and had lots of visitors. I had bought domain names from lots of different places and easily lost track of what I owned. I also had several bits of hosting, so eventually decided to get my own server. I took a full time web guy on to move all the main sites to the new server and do some development. Once they were on, as I had not done it myself, and didn't have proper access to it I had really lost control of the business. My web guy went off ill - and eventually I managed to get access to the server after pressing for a few weeks. I took some backups, but never managed to get it all - and during this time I lost the hard drive to my own pc at home (as story above). When I lost this, I lost access again, and it was around 2 weeks before I was back online again with a new pc. When I did get online I discovered all my websites were offline - and infarct the hard drive had gone on the server. The guy never reported back, and actually refused to give me my backups from when he moved the sites over. So I lost everything. I since discovered that the guy actually had a full time job working for an affiliate network whilst he was working for me.
I tell you this - not just to show you how stupid I was - but so that you don't ever do it yourself. ALWAYS keep control / access - even if someone is developing your site and you don't know anything about code, you MUST request hard copies of weekly backups of what they have developed.
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