……We’ve all been there, one day your PC is humming along nicely the next day you’re greeted with the Blue Screen of Death and that backup disc you’ve been meaning to make for the last 3 months is lying next to your unused gym card. Usually this happens the same day that you have some urgent online banking to do or an important report is overdue, either way, to avoid those sleepless nights and fist clenching screams at the crescent moon…..Back Your Stuff Up!

How? you ask…..well, have no fear my dear digital peasants all shall be revealed Firstly we can do things the old school way and manually copy the most important data on your computer either to a DVD Disc or to an external drive or perhaps a flash drive. The most important things you wanna save are your E-mails, Address Book, Desktop and your My Documents folder, these are the most common places Windows users store there stuff. Yes, I know, you can use a backup program to do this automatically for you but it’s always good to know where your data is actually stored on your machine.

If you use Outlook Express your e-mails are stored in following folder: C:\documents and settings\ “users profile name”\ local settings\ application data \ Identities\ Microsoft\ Outook Express

If you can’t find the local settings folder that would be because it is hidden by default on Windows XP, to unhide the folder you need to open up a folder, any folder i.e My Documents, click on the Tools menu, click on Folder Options, click the View tab and half way down the white text box you select the “Show hidden files and folders” radio button and click Apply and Ok. When you copy the Outlook Express folder to a backup location just remember to not have Outlook Express running at the same time otherwise you won’t be able to copy the folder.

The Outlook Express Address Book is kept in a separate location which you can find here: C:\documents and settings\”users profile name”\application data\ Microsoft \ Address Book.

If you use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail your e-mails will be stored in the following location: C:\documents and settings\”user profile name”\ local settings\ application data\ Microsoft\ Outlook . Outlook stores your contact information ( address book ) in the same file.

To copy your My Documents folder and all the files you keep on the Desktop you need to copy those folders from the these locations respectively: C:\documents and settings\”users profile name”\ My Documents

C:\documents and settings\”users profile name”\ Desktop

It’s always a good idea to have a printed copy of all your usernames, passwords and e-mail settings that were given to you when you first setup your e-mail account, it’ll save you the hassle of phoning your service provider when it comes time to setting up your mail account again.

Okay, so now that you know how and where to manually backup your most important information lets look at one of the ways you can backup your data automatically. These days flash drives and external harddrives are the most common form of storage media simply because they can hold so much more data than a dvd, plus they are relatively cheap. I use a little freeware program called Universal Backup Tool to automatically back my stuff up to an external drive, you can download the software for free HERE.

Once you’ve installed UBT and clicked the icon to run the program the first screen that comes up will ask you where you would like to backup your data to, click on the blue arrow and select the backup drive where you would like to copy your data to. I usually create a new folder on my external drive called Daily Backup or Weekly backup that I backup my data too, it just makes life easier when it comes to restoring a backed up file.

Just keep in mind that UBT backups up your data into a database and not as as straight copy and paste which means that if you need to restore your files you will have to use UBT to restore them back to their original form. To do that is pretty straight forward as well, just open the program, Select restore, browse to where you have your backed up data, select the most recent backup from the list, which is dated from the most recent backup to the oldest one, Tick the box, Click the button “Restore To” which allows you to select where you would like to save your restored files to and then click restore, wait for the message that says the restore is complete and you’re done.

There we go, no excuses…..now go and back your stuff up!