Getting your Backup; Losing Data Stored on Your Notebook
Computer is One of the Perils of Modern Life -
but There's Nothing Hard About Reducing the Risk

SOMETIMES, those who need to back up their data the most, do it the least.

That's often the case with notebook computer users.

The fact is, notebooks are especially vulnerable to data loss.

Not only can notebook hard drives fail just like those in desktop computers, but notebooks carry the obvious added risk of being transported -- and dropped.

One untimely fall from a stool on to a wooden floor can spell the end of your notebook -- and its data.

The solution is obvious: Don't take your notebook's data for granted.

Until recently, though, the process of backing up your notebook computer was cumbersome, if it was even possible.

Owners of stand-alone notebooks, those not attached to networks, usually just backed up central data on to floppy discs or writable CDs.

Of course, that's not a great solution, since if your hard drive goes down, you're faced with problems or even days of restoration work to retrieve your operating system, applications and data.

But things have changed.

Several backup solutions now make backing up notebook computers a snap.

Most of the solutions are not without some cost, but the price of backing up your notebook is easily justified if you think about how much your data is worth.

Get an External Hard Drive

One of the best and easiest solutions for backing up a notebook is to buy one of the USB or FireWire-enabled external hard drives.

These days, you'll find external hard drives -- which come in their own enclosure, ready to go -- in the 80 gigabyte (GB) range. Eight gigabytes is more than enough to back up any notebook on the market.

USB or FireWire hard drives are simple to use. You just plug them into unavailable USB or FireWire ports on the back of your notebook, and the drive should instantly be recognized by your operating system.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP are especially easily configured with external hard drives.

For notebook computers, you'll probably want to steer towards a USB external hard drive, since few notebooks today come standard with FireWire ports.

Once your hard drive is hooked up, you can simply run Microsoft Backup, which comes standard with every version of Windows. It's found in your Start menu under Programs, Accessories, System Tools.

PC Card Hard Drives

A more elegant, if more expensive solution is to purchase one of the new PCMCIA PC card hard drives designed specifically to back up notebook PCs.

These credit-card size hard drives are enclosed in a standard PCMCIA device that fits into your notebook's PCMCIA slot. Every notebook computer today has such a slot.

Usually, the capacity of these hard drives is sufficient to back up all of the data that most people store. Today, the capacity of these cards typically tops out at around 80 GB.

Still, that's more than enough to back up most people's essential data, and many users could back up their entire hard drive on these cards.

There are many PC card hard drive models on the market.

Network Backup

If you spend any time with your notebook computer connected to a network, take 10 minutes to devise a backup strategy.

Securing your notebook's data by backing up to another machine to which you're connected is easy.

You can use any backup program for the job, including Microsoft Backup.

Or you can simply copy the data using a straight copy-and-paste operation with Windows Explorer.

DVD or CDs

Rewritable DVDs or CDs can of course be used to back up any data, but their capacities are small and their performance is slow.

Still, they're better than nothing.

Although they probably won't be able to hold your entire hard drive's worth of data, backing up essential files on a daily or weekly basis can be done with rewritable DVDs or CDs.

The Software

By far the most carefree backup solutions for notebooks today are the PC card systems. Some of these, such as the CMS Automatic Backup System (http://www.cmsproducts. com), don't even require you to use backup software -- it's built right into the device.

You just pop in the drive and a mirror image is taken of your hard drive, ready to be restored later.

If you want to take a more manual route, though, you'll need to decide on which backup software to use.

While Microsoft Backup is free, it will not allow you to schedule unattended backups. For that, you'll need a more robust program.

A program such as Best Backup (http://www.datalandsoftware.com/bestbackup/index.html) is available as shareware, and costs just $US 10. A bit more feature-laden is WinBackup, available for $US 39 (download a review copy).