What Computer Data should I back up?

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Backing up your computer is important however, you don’t necessarily need to backup every single file residing on your hard drive. Your backups are part of a larger recovery strategy. First, it’s simply impractical to back up the entire operating system, all program files, system settings, and data. Plus, you can always reinstall your operating system and programs from the original installation discs. In addition, your computer has systems in place for restoring or repairing system files such as System Restore or Microsoft Windows Resource Checker.

When deciding what to back up, focus on data. This includes documents, spreadsheets, financial data, photos, videos, and any other information that you value. For example, if you’re a poet who regularly composes poems on your computer, make sure to back up your poetry files! Likewise, if you’re business professional who has a huge database of customers on your computer, make sure to backup the database.

Simply choosing to back up your My Documents folder isn’t good enough. For example, if you use a tax preparation program such as TurboTax or TaxCut to file your taxes each year, your data may be stored in the application’s folder - not My Documents. Similarly, if you have an Act Database with all of your professional contacts’ information stored in it, the actual data will be in the Act folder. In addition, if you’ve created your own folder system or have partitioned your hard drive, you’ll need to make sure that you carefully go through each folder and subfolder in search of data.

Before setting up the backup, it’s smart to create a list of data that you know you need to backup and then go through and find the appropriate folder. For example, your list might look something like this:

Family photos
Manuscripts
Microsoft Money files
Tax returns
Contact list
Estate planning documents
Travel videos
Recipes
All work-related files (D: drive)

The first backup will take a great deal of time because the data has not been backed up before. Once backed up, future backups will be much faster as only changed files are copied. For example, if you’ve only altered three files since the last backup, then only three files will be copied.

Make sure that when the backup is scheduled, all programs and documents are closed. Otherwise, if the backup utility sees that the data is in use, it might skip the file.

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