How to back up your computer?

Two other options:
1) If this is a work laptop can you ask your IT guy how your company handles laptop backups?
2) If you are on your own for backup consider backing up your data to the cloud. This simply requires signing up, downloading and installing software, and then walking through a backup wizard that asks you what and how often you want to backup data. Two companies I recommend are www.jungledisk.com and www.carbonite.com.

It could be as simple as buying a 16 MB USB drive online for $30 and dragging your My Documents to the drive periodically.

Kristin,

When you say ancient how old do you mean? In other words what operating system does it have installed on it? (Windows Vista, XP, 2000, Linux?)

John S, MCSE, Sr. Storage Engineer

Good question! I have been backing up my data for over a decade and it saved me a lot of heartaches.

I recommend you backup all of your files on your computer on to an external hard drive. I actually use two hard drives. One I keep close to my computer and the other I keep in my safety deposit box at my bank. I swap them every week or two.

Many of the hard drives come with a backup program. I actually bought my own from Acronis (http://www.acronis.com/). I use automatic scheduling within my backup program and have it to do a full backup weekly (for me on Sundays around 11PM) and an incremental backups every weekday again at 11PM.

Let me know if you have any more questions. Good luck!

To the varied answers above, and providing you would normally work on a server where your data should be regulary backed up, I would also suggest looking at a data sync tool - various available online. Depending on what version of OS you are running, this may already be a part of the installation. Minor configuration required, but once running, will give you peace of mind. That way, you would be able to work independently from the server - stand alone - yet when you connect to your network, your laptop data will automatically be synchronised with the data already stored on the server.
For personal data, any other external means - Cloud/USB would be best or you may find yourself in breech of certain company practices - use of work hardware for personal use?

I agrea with Jay on the Carbonite, I have use the profesional version to backup multiple locations. One thing it lacks is email notification. If you want to check backup I usally go to the website. Windows 7 has a pretty good built in system that tells you what you need to backup. Just go to START and in your search Just type backup and follow instructions.

www.caltechsys.com

Nobody will take care better about your personal data but you. Consolidate your data to one folder – best case of scenario if you have D: drive (C: drive is for system and by default your profile is on C: drive) but this setup is depending on laptop HW which you got.

• Create master folder on D: Drive – D:\KristenFiles with all needed subfolders.
• Configure all your application to save files (as default) to appropriate directory in that folder
• Examples:
• D:\KristenFiles\Email\
• D:\KristenFiles\ClientData\

Now you have all your data on partition D: and in one consolidated location. You can always to take out hard drive from laptop, connect to different computer and read it in case if system (C: driver) will crash and computer will not start up.

In meantime, you can establish procedure (scheduled job/backup/etc) to backup your files from that location to network drive/USB Flash Drive/External HDrive/Etc) as you needed.

Hi Kristen. It is unlikely that your company expects you to back-up your laptop computer. It is likely that your company has designed their IT infrastructure in a manner that only allows you to create files in locations that get backup-up via the "corporate backup system". It is most likely that these locations are on a "data server computer" and your laptop computer accesses these locations over the network.
The fact that you were issued a computer without you being made aware of this mechanism is an oversight and needs to be resolved.

I would open a ticket with your IT department to find your answers.

Note that it might be possible for you to create files on your laptop in locations that re not backed-up. Also note that the vast majority of the previous answers might violate IT policy's within your company

I use SyncBack Free:

http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware

You can backup to a network drive, internal, or external hard drive.

In the event that you have to use the backup you can install a new hard drive and just copy the data you need or if you need the system exactly the way it was at last backup you can install the backup drive (or a copy of it) into the crashed machine and then do a Windows repair install and you're good to go. I have done this a couple of times and it works fine for a free solution.

www.mozy.com (an EMC company) is awesome for me (less than $5 bucks a month)... I had two HDD's crash in less than a year, and without it, I would have been screwed (13 years of contacts, 20k+ resumes) Best, Brian-

Brian and Carlene both have excellent ideas. Always look for an offsite solution like Brian and always have a portable storage solution like Carlene where you save often. The protable storage solutions are in Terrabytes now for under $80.00. I have bought the office group Iomega 1TB protable hard drives to back up to as well as our main servers. We have found out that even the well maintained servers can loose file information.