"Backup, backup, backup!" How many times have you heard that? How many times have you wished you had followed that advice a little sooner? I can recall several times when I lost data, some by accident, some through my own carelessness. I vowed it would never happen again! The scope of this article is directed towards those who need to know: What to Backup: A “backup” in it’s simplest form is a copy of a file in two locations, for instance your computer's hard drive and a floppy disk. Scenario: You have just finished writing an essay in your favourite word processor and it is saved in My Documents (usually). Since you have spent hours on it, you want to make sure you don’t loose it due to a computer crash or other unforeseen event (like a little brother/sister deleting it!). Or you are working on your family tree or finished scanning all those priceless old photos. These are all personally created data that would be difficult or even impossible to recreate.
What are your options?
You can: - use the actual program to save a copy to another location. Some applications, like Word can be set to do this at regular intervals. Check the program's Help files for directions.
- copy it to a floppy, provided it’s smaller than 1.44MB
 - copy (burn) it to a CDR(W) or a DVD-R(W)
- copy it to another partition or another drive in your PC (more on this below)
- upload it to your personal web space, if you have some.
These are simple, easy to do backup solutions for a single file or files. What if you need to backup your entire “My Documents” folder, or all those digital photos, MP3s or emails? You can: - copy them to another partition or drive on your PC; either internal or external.
- burn them to a CDR(W)/DVD(RW)
Those are about all you have as choices, unless you have an external hard drive or memory stick. How to copy to another partition or drive: This may or may not be an option for you, depending on how your PC’s hard drive (HDD in computer lingo) is setup. Most HDDs that come preinstalled with Windows from a manufacturer like DELL or IBM are often formatted as one large C: drive. You can check this by going into “My Computer”. Likely all you will see is your floppy drive (if you have one), your C: drive and your CD and/or DVD drives: 
In order to partition a HDD, that is to divide up the one large C: drive into smaller sections (partitions), one needs a third-party tool like Acronis Disk Director, PartitionMagic or BootItNG. These can be used under Windows to partition a drive. This is something that should be done by a PC technician or a computer-savvy friend or relative. For more information, here is an excellent article called Partition Planning.  One word of warning for saving data to another partition: hard drives can fail resulting in your backups being inaccessible or even lost for good! You should still save a backup to a removable type of medium like a CD, external hard drive or a memory stick (depending on it's capacity).
Another option is to install a second hard drive and use it to store backups. Hard drives are quite inexpensive these days, so this may be a viable option for you. Again, get someone knowledgeable to install it for you.
An external hard drive or DVD burner is also a viable, affordable option and one I use myself with both my desktop and laptop computers for performing backups. Typically, these attach to the host PC by a USB port. If you have another partition (or a second drive) with free space, that's great. There are plenty of free programs that can be used to automatically or manually backup (or copy) your files to another location. Let's look at some. (continued on next page) 
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