It could be family photos and correspondence, or marketing plans and accounting files, but if it has value and resides on your computer system ? one PC, several or a whole company network ? it needs to be backed up. Here is a solid introduction to backing up your computer that you can modify and customize to your particular needs.

Planning prevents poor performance

To clarify your plan, make it understandable to yourself and everyone else involved, and have a roadmap to follow now and in the future, you should develop a written backup plan. Whether it's a one-person home office or a corporate hierarchy, a written plan will keep things under control.

You need to answer a few preliminary questions:

1. Exactly what needs to be backed up, from what computer(s) or device(s)?

2. Where will it be backed up to?

3. How often will backups occur?

4. Who's in charge of performing backups?

5. Who determines the success of these backups?

Before starting, remember that there are many things on your drives that do not need backing up. You do not have to back up the applications for which you have the installation discs, for example, and the same goes for your core OS (Operating System), whether Macintosh, Windows or Linux.

Some home and business users who use a ?cloning? backup method (discussed below) do, in fact, backup applications and the OS. The advantage to this is that any special additions to the OS ? application plug-ins, dictionaries, etc. ? are saved right where they are. That is, they would not have to be restored from CDs or other installation files.

First things first

In business, of course, databases and accounting files are the most critical ?data assets.? Since they should be backed up both before and after any sort of significant alteration or use, most companies are backing up these files every day. Databases should probably be backed up after any substantial data-entry session.

Both Mac OS X and the latest Windows OS's create, by default, ?Documents? folders, which are often the major (but not the only) location for important work. These should be backed up daily, as well as e-mails that are ?mission critical.?

In addition to accessible on-site backups, businesses in particular should store a copy of its backups off-site. This will protect your critical data in the event of a fire, flood, theft or other such occurrence. You should consider storing backups in a safety-deposit box or a secure storage location, using the ?2x2x2 rule? ? two sets of backups stored by two different people or companies at two separate locations. If disaster does strike, this will not sound like a paranoid idea at all.

Don't forget that there is data on your laptops and handheld devices that also contain valuable information. In your backup plan, you should specify how and when laptops and PDAs should be backed up, and whether those backups should be integrated into a particular computer's backup schedule or just backed up independently.

Hardware overview

Any number of solutions can work for you, whether you are a simple home user or the IT manager of a large firm. The strategies are the same, but the scale is different. You need to figure out how much data you need to back up, from each individual computer as well as any networked, shared drives. Allow for ?mission creep? and for the addition of new employees or systems through the upcoming year (or month, or quarter).

The backup device(s) you choose should have a storage capacity of double the amount of data you just calculated as needing to be backed up. This allows sufficient space for growth. Larger organizations find that tape drives are a good choice, bringing together reliability, reasonably fast read/write speeds and large capacities. In fact, in businesses with a solid IT infrastructure, tape drives have become the de facto standard for backups, and with definite, defined procedures in place they are both reliable and efficient.

Adding additional internal drives is a good solution for the home user and small businesses. All Macs and PCs have extra, built-in, internal drive connections, although there are now several standards. Older IDE drives have connections called PATA, for Parallel ATA, while the newer standard is SATA (Serial ATA). Make sure you determine compatibility when buying internal drives.

Ultra-wide SCSI is the fastest external standard, but it is expensive and not as popular now except for large firms that can afford it. Most external hard drives use the USB and IEEE 1394 (FireWire) connections, making them usable with all modern PCs, of all kinds. High-end server-class hardware, on the other hand, is outfitted with built-in SCSI or the newest standard SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).

Finally, there are CDs and DVDs, too. You can back up to these media, and store data for many years without any degradation. However, the storage capacities are low (650-700MB for CDs, 4.7-9BG for DVDs) unless you opt for the latest, more expensive BluRay technology. The BR discs hold 25-50GB of data, but the discs are still costly and the drives are, too. As prices come down, this option will be more viable for home offices and small businesses. However, the downside of disc storage is low volume (even 50GB is small compared to a low-cost 1TB hard drive) and the read/write times involved in backing up and restoring.

Backup software

Both Mac OS X and Windows (all modern flavors, particularly XP and Vista) have their own backup software. In Windows, you will find it under Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup, while the Mac OS has TimeMachine for automated use. These are more than adequate for individual users, and even small businesses.

There is also software that handles backups in an entirely different manner, by cloning (making a perfect, bit-by-bit copy of) your hard drive. The rationale for doing this is that it keeps a perfect, working copy of your current hard drive stored externally. The backups can even be used to boot up your computer if the current drive's OS gets ?scrambled? or you lose functionality for some physical reason (failed drive head or motor).

Finally, you can even perform backups with no software at all by simply copying your important files. Whatever approach you take, you need to be realistic and understand that, if you do not perform regular backups, you will regret it ? maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday. Like buying insurance, backing up your data is not something you can wait to do until you need it.

Don't let it be ?too late? for you and your important data. Set up a good backup plan today, institute it now, follow the plan assiduously and allow yourself no excuses. With all of the help available, online and off, there is no reason you cannot get yourself properly set up. Now would be a good time to start.