I was wondering how I should go about making backups of all my files, etc. I know some people recommend just saving everything important on CD, other use proper backupsoftware, ...

Now, doing it all by hand seems to be too much bother for me, on the other hand it would allow to just save what was really needed (and not end up with secure copies of my spam-mail ...)

Any ideas?

It depends on what you want to back up and what operating system and backup hardware (e.g. CD writer, DVD writer, etc) your PC has. If you are running Windows 2000 or XP, then you already have Microsoft Backup available. To be honest, that isn't a very good bit of backup software but at least it's free. It also allows backups to be scheduled so that you don't have to keep manually selecting all the files. However, it won't back up to CD/DVD - only to hard disks or removable USB drives.

For simplicity, I prefer to have all of my applications storing their data in the "My Documents" folder. That way, simply backing up the My Documents folder ensures that I have all of the data that I'd ever need if the PC developed a problem and I had to re-install Windows and recover my data from a backup.

I tried the whole "storing everything in the my files folder" route, too. Didn't wortk too well, since I always ended up with a few odd files saved elswhere - especially since some programs want files to be put in special places rather than where i wanted them to go.

Well, now I am Norton Save and Restore - you can either go the full way and store the entire harddisk, or you can pick files, folders, filketypes, whatever you like to be saved. Doesn't make a difference to the program or the restoring procedure. (It lets you pick single files, too, if you've just lost the one thing. Pretty neat!)

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