Setting Up Backups with Karen’s Replicator
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- An external hard disk drive
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Backing up your computer system regularly is one of the best ways of keeping your system secure. It may not protect against data theft, but it will definitely protect against data loss. Nowadays there are so many options for backing up that we could fill an entire article with the plusses and minuses of these programs.
The biggest trouble with all backup programs is two-fold: first, most of them are pretty complex to set up; second, all of them need to be scheduled to run.
The first can be taken care of by selecting a program with a simple set-up and user interface. The second, however, is not as easy to manage. Most people turn their computers off at night, so scheduling a backup at “off hours” is not feasible for regular users; if the backup is set to “working hours” on your machine, you’ll find it interrupting your work flow; if you decide to handle your backup manually (i.e. you run by clicking an icon on your desktop), you will tend to forget to do your backup. So, the solution to all of these problems is simply this: commit in your mind to doing your backup regularly. Commit to doing it as regularly as telling your spouse you love him or her, as regularly as spending time in your daily devotions, or as regularly as paying your bills. If you commit to this, backing up will become a habit that you will find hard to break.
When you decide that you want to regularly back up your machine, you’ll have to have some medium to back up to . Nowadays the easiest solution to that is to purchase an external hard drive. These have come way down in price in the last year or so and are now available at about $0.30 USD per Gigabyte (i.e. a 100 GB drive should cost around $30 USD). You can purchase one at your big-box-mart or on-line, whichever you prefer. I would recommend buying one that is twice the size of the drive in your computer. This will allow for growth of data.
That said, with all of the software options out there to backup your hard drive, we want something simple we can use. I have found that one of the most simple pieces of software to use for manual backups is Karen’s Replicator. It is free and quite powerful for making backups to your Windows machine. You can get it and Karen’s many other power tools from http://www.karenware.com . In this article we will walk through the steps of setting up a backup scheme for your My Documents folder. Then at the end we will talk about how to best run your backup using Karen’s Replicator
So, let’s get started. First we’ll follow six steps in Setting up Karen’s Replicator:
- Download and Install Karen’s Replicator
- Set Up Your External Drive
- Start Karen’s Replicator
- Set Up Your Backup
- Run Your First Backup
Following this we’ll discuss some folders other than your My Documents folder you may want to back up and look at automating and scheduling Karen’s Replicator.
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