If you use your computer at all these days, chances are good that you have valuable data stored on it. Whether it’s personal data like your tax returns, checkbook program, photos, videos and music, or data you need for work, you’re doing yourself a major disservice if you don’t have a data backup plan in place.

Hard disk failures and other computer catastrophes can strike at any time. Accidental erasure and file corruption are the most likely data disasters you’ll face, so it makes sense to prepare for those. Fortunately, Windows Vista has a built-in data backup and recovery system to protect your data from accidental loss.

Don’t Forget To Back Up Your Drivers

Backups are good not only for data, but also for system configuration information and hardware drivers. A computer’s configuration tends to be “set and forget.” Often we don’t remember exactly how the computer is configured. Having an up-to-date backup of your configuration information is critical if you ever need to restore a hard disk.

To get to the built-in backup and restore functions on Windows, choose Start > Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Backup and Restore Center.
Choose Back up files. Windows Vista will start a wizard that will step you through the process of backing up the data on your hard disk. You may be asked to enter the administrator password for the computer to complete the backup process. You can also set Windows Vista to make regular backups of your data.

Backups require a bit of strategy. It’s good to make backups frequently, but your backups won’t help you much if they’re also stored on the same hard disk as the original data. You know… the hard disk that’s most likely to crash when you least expect it?

Think about what you want to store and where you want to store it. You may find that you want to back up your data to a removable hard disk that you store elsewhere, or that you want to write your backup files to another disk on your network. Having an independent data storage site is the best way to protect your data.

You may also find that you don’t want to store all of the data on your hard drive, but rather just the most important information. Your data storage site should be kept as secure as your hard disk is. If you encrypt your backed up data, just be sure that you can decrypt it later. It’s always a good idea to go through the decryption and data restore processes in a non-emergency to be sure you can do it when the chips are down.

Photo Credit: Barney Livingston