Susan Newcomb, Dragon's Point Computers

Susan spoke, outlining their recommendations for ensuring quality back-ups of the personal or business information stored on our computers.

First:
Organize your files. Place your important files and folders in the "My Documents" directory on your PC.
Second:
Determine the media you will be using for your backup (e.g. external hard drive, CD/CDRW or DVD/DVDRW). Remember, a CD can hold 700 MB of info, a Single sided DVD can hold 4.7GB and a dual-layer DVD can hold 8.4GB of information. You can Right Click on Start, Click on "Explore" then Right Click on the "My Documents" folder, then Click on "Properties" to review how much space is in use for My Documents and choose the medium accordingly.
Third:
Determine if you want to do a "Full" or "Incremental" backup. This option will depend on which software you use to perform the backup.
Last:
Backup your data on an appropriate schedule. For Home users, once per month may be sufficient. For Business Users, once per week or more often is suggested. When it comes to your important "BUSINESS" files (QuickBooks, PeachTree, Customer Information, etc.) daily backups might be the best solution.

The question was asked, "How can you tell if your hard drive is going out?".
Answer: Listen for unusual hard drive noises, be aware of issues with saving files or if your PC performance suddenly drops off, this could be an indication of a hard drive problem.

J. R. reminded us that, if we don't have the time to do these backups, Dragon's Point offers a Backup Service.