Backing Up Your Hard Drive

Because your computer has many important personal files on its hard drive, if they all disappeared one day, you would probably be devastated. Hard drives don’t live forever, as some people seem to think, therefore it’s important to back up your hard drive regularly.

Our first recommendation is to buy a good backup program, like the software on the left, or possibly use Microsoft Backup that comes with Windows 98. There are several good programs out there that will do the job, but make sure that you buy one that is current for your version of Windows. A backup system designed for Windows 95 may not be reliable for Windows 98 or Windows 2000. If you can’t find Microsoft Backup on your computer with Windows 98, try looking on the Windows 98 CD. It doesn’t automatically install with Windows, so you may have to install it manually.

There are many mediums on which you can backup your information. The most common right now are CD-Rewritable Drives, and Zip Drives. CD-Rewritable Drives are different than CD-Writeable drives, the difference being that with Rewritables, you can erase and copy over the same CD, much like you can with a floppy disk. Zip disks look like over sized floppy disks, and can hold about 100 MB of information each. CDs can hold about 700 MB of information each. For more information on what a MB is, visit our Bytes, Kilobytes, and Megabytes tutorial.

Others use less popular mediums such as tape backup units (computerized tape recorder) or even using many floppy disks. If you use either of these methods, only backup your essentials. Floppy disks only hold 1.44 MB of information, and therefore will take all Saturday afternoon and a thousand disks to back up even a small hard drive.

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