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Personal Backup Strategies

First, decide what you need to backup. The contents of your hard drive are your operating system, applications, and your own data. E-mails, your address book, bookmarked Web sites, the dialup number for your ISP, and anything else that you've added or changed on your system should be on this list of important files. Don't forget the Registry, having a backup of this can save you a lot of headaches when things go wrong.

It is important to know how much backup room you'll need. As a rule of thumb, your backup should have twice as much space as you currently need, allowing for growth without having to change your backup strategy.

Backup Frequency

Next, decide on the frequency of your backups. A good guide is to ask yourself how many days of data you can afford to risk losing. If it is one or less you need to back up every day, but for an average user a weekly backup, with critical data backups as necessary, is sufficient.

CDs As Backup Medium

Choosing the appropriate backup medium depends on the size and the frequency of your backups. If you already have a CD-RW drive in your system, and you don't need more than a CD-RW's 650MB capacity, then you don't need to look any further. Though not as popular as they used to be, tape backup drives can still handle large amounts of data cost-effectively.

Many of us keep our backed up data in the same room as our PC, and as one of the most common causes of data loss is a hard drive crash that is fine; CDs sitting on your desk will protect you. To prevent a total loss of data from fire, flood, or other disaster, keeping at least one copy of backed up data off-site is an exorbitant precaution, this can be physically moving backup CDs or tapes to a friends house or uploading data to an online storage location.

Dvds As a Backup Medium

DVD-rewritable drives are becoming more common, and with a capacity for up to 4.7GB of data single-sided, or 9.4 GB double-sided they are very useful as a backup medium. They are more expensive than CD, but the high capacity and rewriting up to 100, 000 times takes some of the edge off the cost.

Tape Backups

Tape drives can often store the entire contents of a hard drives on a single tape, backups to tape are very fast and reliable, and additional tape cartridges are inexpensive but unless you're running a business from your PC it is an overkill option for personal users.

Having said that, some types of tape drives and tape technologies are becoming more affordable for personal users. The Seagate Travan is probably the cheapest drive at under $300, but Sony and Quantum also have reasonably priced entry level drives. These all offer 40GB of storage per tape, at a transfer rate of 2MB per second. Consider that tape is the cheapest medium in terms of cost-per-gigabyte, and this can be attractive if you need fast and frequent full backups.

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the best online backup software -- Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/personal-backup-strategies.html