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Proactive IT and Computer Support

Felixstowe Spotlight Magazine and Parker Networks Ltd hope to bring you some useful home computer tips each month,

Keeping your data safe....

There are several ways of keeping your data safe. The most important thing to remember is that just leaving your pictures, documents, emails and addresses, etc on your PC, will not ensure their safety.

The Options 

CD / DVD  Every week / month copy your data to a CD or DVD manually using the software provided with your machine, most often or not, Sonic or Roxio. Just follow the wizard and create disks to contain the contents of "My Documents" and "My Pictures" folders on your PC, assuming this is where you keep your documents and pictures. There is a but here and I’ll come back to it later.
USB Pen These are small, cheap and convenient. Just copy your files to the Pen and then copy to another PC. I have known these Pens to lose data or fail completely so it’s not the best way of keeping data for long periods of time, but a very convenient way of moving data from one machine to another.
Back Up Drive These are great in my humble opinion, and what I recommend to my home office customers. They are a stand alone, normally USB connected hard drive, with software for running backups already installed within them.

Emails and Address Books etc As I mentioned earlier, there was a but up there in my first suggestion and that refers to Emails. If you use web based email systems, do not worry as your emails are stored at your ISP (Internet Service Provider) but if you use Outlook or Outlook Express, it is a different story. Your emails are kept in hidden folders on the PC, not really coverable in this article but Microsoft have Knowledge Articles on how to find and back them up here http://support.microsoft.com /kb/287070  for Outlook and look here for Outlook Express http://support.microsoft.com/kb/188854

My personal preference for Home use. I use a mixture of a Maxtor 500gb Back Up Drive. It sits on my desk working away and backing up all my photos and documents each day at 5pm without me having to do a thing, These are available at leading stores for around £70. I also Copy each new session of holiday photographs I take, to a separate DVD for filing. The good thing about these is they can be lent to friends and also watched on the TV at home.

Recovery Disks....

Kicking off this month with a simple and easy way to save money before disaster strikes. All computers should have recovery or system disks, without these its often quite hard to repair a machine. These disc’s most commonly come in the form of a couple of DVD’s or CD’s, or on more budget conscious machines they can be an image on the hard drive that needs to be turned it to disks using the create system discs routine, most machines will prompt you to do this when a new machine is first turned on, or via a create recovery disc program. See here for more details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_partition

 

It can take almost three times as long to complete a successful major repair without these discs, sometimes they will have to be obtained from manufacturers and or files have to be downloaded from internet before a repair can be carried out. Over the last four years lots of people have given me disks from other machines hopping these would work, sorry they don’t, each copy of Windows XP or Vista is machine specific. Once a machine has had a major fault these discs can’t generally be created, so the costs of a repair can go up considerably. So if you haven’t made them yet now’s the time to find a couple of blank DVD’s and create them. So when you unpack your new PC this Christmas please create this discs and save them away for when you need them, it turns a three hour job in to an hour’s work and you might even be able to repair your  machine yourself !  If you purchase a machine from a one of our smaller computer vendors please insist these disks are passed to you at the time of purchase and there is a hologram sticker showing the Microsoft licence number attached to the case of the machine without them a nasty bill from Microsoft can arise when the machine is checked for updates over the internet  if Microsoft detects a invalid copy of Windows you will have to buy valid licence from Microsoft there and then to carry on using your machine, I’ve had three customers recently fall fail of this problem. You can always look here for more help www.microsoft.com/resources/howtotell