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Computer files disappear. Were they yours?
Posted by Michael Milette
Self-Help Centre >>

Haven't backed up your computer in a while? You may want to consider doing it sooner than later.

Do you recognize any of these possible situations?

  • You have been working on your family tree or home inventory, a collection of digital family photos, clip art, videos, music or a diary.
  • You have been developing a revolutionary piece of software, musical masterpiece, award winning architectural design or art that is going to put you on the road to fortune and fame.
  • You run your business off your computer. The information might include accounting information such as accounts receivable, list of customer contacts and inventory.
  • You have spent years building a knowledge base, saving email correspondences or articles from newsgroups, scheduling every detail of your life in your agenda, keeping track of to-do lists, phone numbers, birth dates.
  • You have been out of work for a while, you have spent countless hours, days, weeks or even months working on your thesis, or preparing the perfect resume, building up your list of contacts, potential jobs, tracking each and every resume that has gone out, and scheduled your appointments. Perhaps you are even just one interview from getting that perfect job you have been seeking all this time. 
  • A collection of bookmarks or favourites that are organized just right and enable you to find what you are looking for on the web when you need it.
  • Just about any other information stored on your computer that you have been collecting for years and could not easily replace without re-investing a great deal of time and effort.

What do all of these situations have in common? They may or may not be worth a million, a thousand or even a dollar to anyone else in the world, but they are valuable to you. They represent time and effort that you put in over a long period of time. They are also "stuff on your computer" that would be difficult, if not impossible to replace if they were ever lost.

Imagine you awoke this morning feeling this was going to be your lucky day. You bounced out of bed, took a deep breath of fresh morning air and danced over to your computer. You powered up your good old reliable computer and... nothing happened. No problem. Try it again. Hmm. Again, and again. This is no time to loose one's head. After all, it is probably just a loose cable somewhere, blown fuse, tricky power switch, the fact that your hair is not brushed, you haven't had your morning coffee yet or the planets are not aligned just right. As you make your way though an ever growing list of possible excuses, you find yourself wondering just how long it has been since you last backed up your computer. It doesn't take long for you to realize that this very question is a clear indication that it has been too long (did you ever even get around to it?) Quickly you start to feel your love of life end as your lucky streak comes to a grinding halt before it has even had a chance to get started.

How could this happen? Everything was working just fine yesterday. You've never had even the slightest indication from your PC that anything was even remotely wrong with it. The computer isn't that old. Let's see, Windows 98. That's over 10 years! My first car lasted longer than that and it never lost a wheel!

Fortunately for most people, this is only a possible situation which hasn't happened yet. But if it did, how would this turn of events affect your life today? Tomorrow? What about months from now? Would you be willing to put all that effort in again or would you go back to pen and paper for the rest of your days?

What causes a computer to lose your information? The possibilities are only limited by ones imagination. However, here are just a few examples:

  • Your computer hardware fails without warning.
  • The power lines get hit by lightning and fry your computer.
  • A new virus infects your computer and wipes out or really messes up your data before you even realize your computer is infected.
  • A burglar breaks into your home or business and steels your computer.
  • Your beautiful home office in the basement gets flooded... and to everyone's surprise, your computer didn't float.
  • Your kids decided to make turning your computer on and off in one minute an Olympic event.
  • There was a power failure at just the wrong moment, like just as you were saving your document.
  • Your toddler decided to see just how much orange juice could fit in your computer or decided to see if your keyboard would float in the bathtub.
  • The dog chased the cat and knocked over your computer.
  • The kid from next door who was supposed to install a new hard drive for you to save you a few bucks felt really bad after having accidentally formatted the wrong hard drive.
  • Dust in the air accumulated in your computer causing it to overheat and break down.

As a general rule, you should back up:

  • Email files including your email messages as well as your address book and settings. See below.
  • Dial-up (see below), DSL, Cable and Network Settings.
  • Your web browser settings and bookmarks. See below.
  • Your "My Documents" folder.
  • Anything you have saved on your desktop.
  • Saved game information. Which files depends on the individual game. You might be able to find some help on the developers site.
  • Software registration codes, especially if you received them electronically.
  • Application data stored in its own folder.
  • User ID's and Passwords. Autocomplete information may not get backed-up.
  • Instant messenger chat Logs (Skype, MSN, Yahoo, etc)
  • Your wallpaper (.BMP and .JPG files located in your C:\Windows or C:\WINNT folder.

Take your time and look around your computer for any files that you want to keep. It's a good idea to try to keep all of your data files under a common root folder like My Documents so that you can easily backup your data. If there are other people using your computer, remember to backup their files too, especially if they are bigger than you are.

Essentially, you want to backup anything that you can't replace. Remember, you can always easily re-install your legal installation of Windows and your applications from their original CDs. If you have downloaded and installed any software, be sure to backup the original downloaded files too.

How often should you backup? That depends on how much you use your computer and how much effort you are willing to put into rebuilding your data if it was ever lost. If you rely on your computer to run your business, daily backups would be wise. Of course there is no need to backup your computer on days that you don't use it.

What should I do with my backups? Ideally they should be stored in a location outside your home or place of business. That way, if anything ever happens to your computer, you could replace the computer and the software, and just restore your data on to the new system.

Backup Email

Microsoft Outlook Express

What do you think the chances are that Microsoft made it easy for all of us to backup Outlook Express email? Slim to non-existent of course. Outlook express data actually consists of several parts:

  • Email messages
  • Account settings
  • Address Book (if used)
  • Mail rules (if any)
  • Passwords

Techie and Power User Solution (free!) : Check out "OE Backup". You can find a link to it and many other "must have" Outlook Express add-ons and tools on the Inside Outlook Express web site.

End User Solution (Commercial) : If you prefer a cleaner commercial program, check out Outlook Express Backup Wizard ($39.95 US) or Outlook Express Backup ($34.95 US) which backs up Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox information and settings. 

Microsoft Outlook

If you are using Outlook 2002 or later, Microsoft's "Outlook Personal Folders Backup" is a nice freeware solution. Note however that if  you have personalized the toolbars, you should also make a copy of these two files: Microsoft Outlook Internet Settings.FAV & outcmd.dat which are usually found in C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook, where <UserName> will be your Windows login user name.

For a more complete backup solution for Microsoft Outlook, check out a program called Outlook Backup from BackRex which sells for $34.95 US.

Qualcomm Eudora

Assuming your data files are in their default location, just backup Eudora's application folder, typically c:\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora. The program files itself take up an extra 9 MB but it will be easier than sifting though all the files to separate the data files from the application files. The only way around this is to have your data folder in a different location.

Alternatively, check Mail Backup from BackRex ($49.95 US). Although it is a little more expensive, it will enable you to backup files from just about any of the major email players out there including MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, The Bat!, IncrediMail, Internet Explorer, ICQ, and MSN Messenger.

Backup Web Browser

The Mozilla Family - Firefox / Netscape / Thunderbird eMail

MozBackup seems to be the way to go if you are one of the many who have discovered the joys of using the Mozilla family of products. This is a one stop backup system that will do them all. Compatible with all versions of Windows 98 and later.

 

Backup Internet Explorer and Dial-up Networking

For a complete FREE backup solution for your Internet Explorer settings, check out Internet Explorer Backup from a company called BackRex. Another free alternative is called Backup Internet Explorer Settings. In addition to backing up all of your favourites, passwords, security, history, auto-complete information etc., both of these products will also backup your dial-up account information.

Backup Files

Backing up your files can be done in any of several ways. Some people prefer to just copy their files to a USB memory stick while others copy them to a CD or DVD. Whichever way you do it, make sure it exists in more than one place. For example, don't rely on keeping your files on CD/DVD just because you can take it with you. One day you may find that your CD/DVD doesn't work any more. Also periodically check to make sure your files can be restored from your USB memory stick or CD/DVD. There is no point in making a backup if it won't be there for you when you need it.

Most versions of Windows now include a backup tool. The biggest disadvantage of the Windows Backup application is that the backups are not usually portable and you may not be able to restore files from it in the next version of Windows. For example a backup you made on your old Windows 98 computer may not be retrievable on a newer computer running Windows XP or Vista.

Free Solution: There are several really nice backup programs you can download and use for free from the Internet. Back4Win is quite easy to use and will store your files in the universal ZIP format which means you could retrieve them even in Linux or MacOS. It is compatible with all versions of Windows including 98/Me and Windows 4.0/2000/XP which means you will be able to use it on any computer.

ZIP files: These are files which can store many files not only in a compressed format, requiring less space on your computer, but in a single file making them easy to send by email. For some time now, Windows has included the ability to create compressed ZIP files and extract them too. Applications like WinZIP are now only necessary if you need to do things like create self-extracting ZIP files or password protect them. Even if this is the case, there are many free alternatives out there. A couple of my favourites which I have been using for years are 7-zip and TUGZip. Not only do they take care of all your ZIP files, but it also handles RAR, ARJ, ISO, and more.

Another freeware solution is called ZipGenius. Like TUGZip it can handle lots of different compression formats, but it also makes it easy to backup files located in common folders. ZipGenius will help you backup things like your My Documents folder, Outlook Express messages, address book, favourites, and just about any other folder you specify. There are tons of features included like a great file splitter and an FTP client. You can even import scanned images straight into a ZIP file.

Shareware Solution: The shareware version, Back4WinXP ($24.95 US) also works with all versions of Windows but adds extra features such as the ability to backup directly to CD. Note: The freeware version does not backup system files.

Did you know WinZip is actually Shareware? This means that you can try it for free but you are expected to eventually pay for it if you continue using it. If it's been awhile that you have been using it and would like to continue, please pay for it. Shareware developers like the fine folks at WinZIP depend on the honesty and integrity of people in order to be able to afford ongoing development of the products. So go and do the right thing. If you want something that is really free, watch for the term "Freeware".

Commercial Solution: Retrospect Professional ($129 US), by EMC, offers a great solution for backup and restores. What makes this product special is its ability to restore data accurately. Unless you are always doing full backups of your system, which can be time consuming and take up a lot of space, you would regularly only backup the files that have changed since the last time you backed up your computer. However, if you moved or renamed files, these would be considered new files by most backup systems. When it came time to restore the files, you would most likely end up with both the files in their original location as well as their new location. Renamed files would appear with their old name and their new name. Files deleted since your last full backup would come back to haunt you. Retrospect takes care of tracking these changes. When you restore your files on your computer, you end up with exactly what was on your computer the last time you made an incremental or differential backup. It's compatible with Windows 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP and 2003 and Vista. It is also available for MacOS. Well worth the price, especially if you tend to make a lot of changes or reorganize your files regularly.

Internet Explorer Favourites

Favourites (or Favorites as Americans like to spell it) are stored in a folder called "Favorites". Microsoft made it easy to export both Favorites and Cookies. Simply launch Internet Explorer and click "File", "Import and Export..." and follow the wizard. Alternatively, you can simply locate your favourites folder and include it in your backup. You can change the location where your favourites are stored by using TweakUI available for download from Microsoft. There are currently two versions, one for Windows 2000 and another for Windows XP. Sorry, there isn't a version for Windows Vista.

Last changed: Jun 16 2010 at 11:43 AM

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