Backup sounds like a big decision, this feeling can paralyze you from acting now. I know because it happened to me. That’s why I want to help you make the best decision for your protection. I intend to help him save time and money by giving him the advice and guidance he needs.
What do you need to make a backup? The answer is very simple, it is best to make a backup of everything.
What is everything?
- Emails – If you use an email client on your own PC, you should back up all your contacts, your emails, your settings, and if you use Microsoft Outlook, you should back up your entire PST file. If you use Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo Mail, you don’t need to back up your settings because they are no longer on your local computer.
- Images: digital camera, most cell phones, PC webcam, scanned images and any additional pictures and photos you have, you should back up everything, it is best to keep all this in a folder (and subfolders), it will mostly be “My Pictures”. ” and you should back up this folder.
- Financial records (Quicken, MS Money) – many people manage their finances with this type of software, you can do the same or just do it using Excel or similar, in any case you should save all your “Money” files in a specific folder . (preferably within “My Documents”), you can call it “My Money” and you should back up this folder.
- Office Documents – Any Word, Excel, PowerPoint and equivalent, from school, work or anything else, make sure to back up these files.
- MP3 music files: Your music collection should be backed up.
- Password files (RoboForm or any other password manager) – This is very important, many people forget this problem, if you use such software, know where this file(s) are located and make sure to make a backup.
- And more.
But where are all these files? How can you know where you find these files?
There are two main things where most of your data is located on your computer by default (Windows XP):
- “C:Documents and Settings PROFILE NAME” – Replace “Profile NAME” with the name of your Windows profile
- “My Documents” (defaults to section 1, but many change it to a different location).