It’s a strange moment when a computer dies.
Often, we don’t expect it. Sure, computers can be complicated, unreliable, and confusing, but usually if there’s a problem, there’s a solution, and then we can get on with our complex love/hate relationship with the things.
But when a computer stops working altogether it can be quite a shock – especially if you’re an expert and you’ve tried everything there is to try to get it to turn on. Suddenly the realisation of how reliant we’ve become on them begins to dawn. It’s a just a machine, but actually it isn’t – it’s our means of communication, our storage facility. What do you keep on yours – Photos? Documents? Bookmarks? Passwords?
It’s something to consider if you’ve never experienced it. Just what do we keep on our computers, and how would we get it back if something drastic happened? Of course, the answer is to back up your data, but what data do we have that needs backing up?
General files
If you’re a Windows user, most of your data is probably in the same place. Documents and spreadsheets are probably in ‘My documents’. Same goes for anything else in a similar category – photos, music, related media files. But what about other things?
It can be very easy to use email as a kind of storage system by itself. Just think for a second about what you’ve got hidden away in an email that you might need – addresses? phone numbers? email addresses? – then consider extracting that and storing it somewhere else – in a spreadsheet, for example.
Further to this problem is the need to simply access your email. Do you have the settings stored somewhere? Do you know what the password is, or the outgoing and incoming servers? If you set up the email yourself you’ve probably got this information already, but you can usually find most of it in your email client’s account settings, under Tools or Options.
You should be able to get hold of tutorials for configuring your email client fairly easily from the internet:
- Setting up email in Outlook – http://products.secureserver.net/email/email_outlook.htm
- Configuring Thunderbird – http://support.mozillamessaging.com/bg/kb/Configure an Account
- Setting up Apple Mail – http://www.freeemailtutorials.com/appleMail/setupEmailAccount.cwd
Web browsing
Losing all your bookmarks might be no more than a nuisance, but what about all the passwords your browser remembers so you don’t have to? Luckily, most good browsers provide ways of backing up such data, or storing it in a place where you can make your own backups.
More information:
- Managing profiles in Firefox – http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing profiles
- Backing up Safari data – http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/safari-bookmarks-backup.htm
Saved games
If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably got save files from various games lying around your computer. On Windows, some of these are stored online, others are stored in ‘My Documents’ and some are kept in the game’s installation directory. If you’ve invested a lot of time in getting as far as you have with these games, you might want to consider keeping a copy of those save files.
Other things
Here’s some other things you might want to consider backing up, if you have them.
- Calendar information, depending on what kind of calendar you use
- Any specific installed program data, including settings, passwords or registration codes, e.g. Skype, Dropbox, iTunes…
- Passwords for anything else not covered here, such as wireless connection passwords.
More information
The aim of this article has been to make you think about what data you need to back up. Here are some more links to general guides to other things you should back up, and how to do that.
- A series of guides on saving important data on your Mac – http://macs.about.com/od/backupsarchives/tp/Backup-Or-Move-Your-Important-Mac-Data.htm
- More information about what to save on your Windows PC – http://www.optimizingpc.com/install/backupdata.html
- Windows 7 backup features – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/backup-and-restore.aspx
