Backup Tips

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Revision as of 03:49, 12 February 2011 by Auguste (talk | contribs) (Cleaned up the page a bit, added some new information.)
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  1. Buy an external hard drive, preferably 1TB or greater.
  2. Connect it to your computer.
  3. In the root of the external hard drive, create a folder called 'backups'.
  4. In the 'backups' folder, create another folder named after your computer's name (e.g. "POSEIDON").
  5. In this new folder, create another folder of today's date in the format of YYYY-MM-DD (i.e. 2024-04-19). This format ensures that Windows will properly sort the folders in date order.
  6. Copy everything from your C: drive into this date folder. A program like TeraCopy is exceedingly useful, as it supports copy verification, pause/resume and most importantly, won't randomly die if it runs into any problems.

If you want to back up multiple drives on the same computer, you may want to create separate folders for each drive within your date folder (eg 'C Drive' and 'D Drive') and copy each drive's data into these.

Every couple of days, if your Downloads folder and Desktop gets a bit messy, copy everything from there into a new day folder (like in step 5) and move everything into this folder, then delete the data from your computer. You will be able to speed up your computer by removing data while also saving all of your old data.