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Step 1
This is the most vital step. Please do not store your files on your primary hard drive. There are many reasons for this, one being that it slows your pc down because more files means longer search times on that particular drive. In addition if that drive fails retrieving data will be a nightmare. Instead, I urge you to buy an external usb hard drive, they are dirt cheap and trust me it’s worth it’s weight in gold when your OS crashes.
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Step 2
If you don’t want to buy an external hard drive you can go get an internal one which is even cheaper than the externals. Every pc is set up to have a second hard drive accompany it. All you would have to do is format the new hard drive and then plug the data cable and the power cable in and you’re in business.
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Step 3
If you don’t want to go the hard drive route you can back up your data via cd or dvd. Most likely you’ll have a windows box either running Vista or XP. Both of these operating systems comes with a backup utility that you can use to choose which files or directories you want to back up. For XP the utility is NTbackup.msi and in Vista you click START,CONTROL PANEL, SYSTEM MAINTAINANCE , AND THEN CLICK BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER.
Comments
00Analana said
on 12/10/2008 Great advice! Hard drives are notoriously unreliable and when they crash all of your photos and important info will be gone if you don't have it backed up somewhere else.
Pillain said
on 12/10/2008 The external USB drive sounds like a good idea. Thanks.