Running Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Exactly what you need to back up depends on your circumstances, of course, but here's a general principle worth observing: don't make your backup routine so onerous and time-consuming that you lose the motivation to adhere to it.
In practice, what this means for many users is the following:
- Exclude program files and DLLs that you have installed from a CD, floppy disks, or a network server from your regular normal and differential backup routine. Keep programs and data in separate folders so you can easily exclude programs from backups.
TIP
We recommend storing all your documents in your My Documents folder or its subfolders. That way, you can easily protect your most important data by backing up that one folder.
- Include all data files (documents) in your normal and differential backups. These are the files that change the most and that would be the most difficult to replace.
- If you don't have a regular normal and differential backup routine, at least perform ad hoc backups of the files you're currently working with. If you don't have a tape drive, use Backup to back up these files to another hard disk. If you don't have another hard disk, back them up to floppy disks, Zip disks, or other removable media.