[mca] December Newsletter

From: Mean Drake <meandrake@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: mca@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 23:46:16 +0530

Title: Untitled Document

In This Issue...

I am combining the November and December newsletters as a few personal commitments have prevented me from spending too much time on the newsletter in November. I will also therefore take this opportunity to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as my next newsletter will now only be out in January 2004.

This month’s article is all about backing up your data. Computers can be finicky and sometimes we need to rebuild the system with a fresh install of the operating system. In these times, we need to have access to files that existed on our old system so our productivity does not get affected. This article is a starting point towards building the perfect backup without having to resort to third party tools.

Till next month...

Mean. Everything

Backup Everything!
by Mean Drake

Within the last two months, I have answered a number of queries about people having to format their systems and starting again, some XP upgrades gone bad and operating systems needing a clean install.

A format and reinstall of the operating system by itself is not a major task but what makes it tedious is restoring the PC to the level of functionality that you had before you formatted. All the installed software needs to be reinstalled, you need to reconfigure your browser, your email client and even your desktop just to name a few things. And then you realise you don’t have your last years account statements that you stored in an excel sheet which took 15 days to finish. Why? It was lying in My Documents. And obviously that folder has disappeared after the format.

What I intend to walk you through in this article is not how to reinstall an operating system from scratch but rather how to prepare for this eventuality. So that after the install you should be able to have the PC back to what it was within a days time. For this you need to efficiently backup your data and after a reinstall efficiently restore this. There are a number of utilities available in the market. There are programs that let you Ghost you drives and there are utilities that let you automatically backup data. But I feel at least for the home user it is not so difficult to achieve a proper backup without the use of a third party utility.

Basic requirements:

In order to better manage and restore your data, when setting up the system, see that your hard disk has at least two partitions. So in case you are going to do a format of C: at least whatever files you put on D: will not be harmed. If your system does not have this, you can achieve it by using a tool like Partition Magic or Ranish Partition Manager. Of course this is not 100% mandatory but if you are not going to have this, then a CD-Writer becomes mandatory to save all your files to.

Get started:

The one obvious thing you are going to miss after a clean install is all the programs you currently have installed. The larger suites you probably installed from CDs and many you might have downloaded from the internet. Scan your Start Menu and look at the list of programs. Write down the list and see if you will be able to install this on the new system if you still need it there. Some of the programs might be shareware that you have registered. Make a note of the serial numbers that you will need to re-register them after the install. Having confirmed that you will indeed be able to install all software again, you can move forward. The install files that you have downloaded should be safely saved on D: or CD so you can run the setups again easily. Also remember to keep the registration information. I file away the registration information and the setup.exe of every program I install in a zip file and keep it either on D: or on CD so I have no problems reinstalling the application again after a clean install.

More backup:

Having backed up the software you will need on the clean install, you now need to file away the various settings and data that probably took you days, weeks or months to get there. Let us start category by category.

All the Documents:

I am sure over a period of time you must have created a lot of files on the computer. These may be created from within any program. Images or drawings created in MS Paint or more sophisticated programs, Word documents, Excel files, digital photos, MP3 music...the list is endless. All these are data files that you open from within the various programs that you have installed. A vast majority of these files you will probably find in the My Documents folder but it would be wise to look at the other folders, maybe run some of the programs and see where your important files are saved and copy them to the backup location.

Outlook Express Messages:

In order to backup all emails you have received in Outlook Express, you need to know where OE has stored the messages. This is called the store folder. To find out where your store folder is, in OE go to Tools>Options and look on the maintenance tab. See image alongside.

This will let you see (and change if required but do not do that) the location of the store folder. What you need to do is copy all of these files away for backup and we can import them after the reinstall. I will go a little into the detail of importing them again as that is where people have a little trouble. Many people tend to copy these files back to the store folder and I do not recommend that. I would suggest in OE to go to File>Import>Messages which brings up the following Window.

Select as I have in the image below. Once you select Outlook Express 6 (I hope you have been using it as OE 4 is quite outdated), click next and the next window comes up and this is important.

Here again, make sure you make the selection as shown. After this you will be told to browse to the backup folder and you can then elect to import the messages from there. Its quite simple really and does not disturb any currently received mail.

Outlook Express Contacts:

Contacts are really something we do not want to lose anytime soon as these can be very difficult to get hold off. Luckily its quite easy to back them up. In OE, click the address book icon to bring up the address book as shown.

Here on the menu go to File>Export and here Select Other Address book.

You can select the top option of WAB also but this can then be re-imported only into OE. Using the Other address book option, the backup file can be re-imported not only into OE but into other programs as well. Anyway here the choice is yours. If you do select the Other Address Book option, the next screen will show you the options available to you for this, select the file format of Text File (Comma separated values) as shown in the screenshot.

This will save the file in the csv format which is readable by a number of other programs for email for example Outlook, Eudora etc. and this is why I prefer to do it this way.

Internet Explorer Favourites:

This is pretty straightforward. In Internet Explorer, go to File>Import and Export and from the next window select Export favorites.

This will let you export your favorites to a bookmark.htm file which you can import back later using similar steps.

Outlook Contacts and Messages:

In Outlook, both the contacts and messages get exported along more or less similar lines. Go to File>Import & Export and in the next dialog select Export to a file. In the next dialog box either select Comma Separated Values or if you do not need to co-ordinate with other programs then pst format.

This will then bring up the next window where you get to select what to export. See image above. Select Contacts and then Inbox as two separate files which are again to be imported back later.

Where is that FONT?

Many of our documents like in Word might have fonts used in them that we installed on the system sometime. In a clean install, these new fonts that we add are lost. My method is to keep all these extra fonts that I add to the system filed away in a zip file so I can quickly add these to the new OS in a matter of minutes. In short, everything you download from the internet, store it away. You might need it later.

Summary.

I have covered quite a lot about backing up but not necessarily what all of you might need. Any particular program that you need to ask about, ask. This article was just to develop the insight to know how various things are to be backed up. I certainly have lost a few things in the past and by now have fine tuned the art where I have everything I need on CD. Get into the habit of backing up...you never know when you might need it. Better to need your backups than to regret their absence.

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Bye for now,

Please do send in your feedback, comments, suggestions and brickbats to me by clicking Reply and sending your valuable feedback.

[mca] December Newsletter

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