This tutorial presents a very important fact.

Hard disks break.

Any hard disk can break at any time, and if it breaks you lose all your data .

There is nothing you can do to prevent hard disks from breaking.

To keep from losing your data, you need to back it up.

Actually, there are two issues involved with hard disks breaking:

1. You can lose your data (the documents and other files you have created). Potentially catastrophic.
2. You will have to reinstall all of your programs , settings, and operating system to a new hard disk. Potentially a major hassle.

The first item is of course the most important, and fortunately it is the easiest to safegaurd against. Safeguarding your data involves copying your data files to another data storage device.

The second item is involves copying your entire hard disk, including the System data to another storage device. This second type of backup requires a storage device big enough to hold all of the files being copied, and also requires a special program to copy the system data. One such special program is the Windows backup program, covered in the next tutorial in this series.

This tutorial will cover only data backups (safeguard against the first item above).

The options for backing up your data depend on:

1. The size of the data to be backed up.
2. The type of storage devices you have connected to your computer.

Needless to say, the total size of all of the files that you want to back up must not be larger than the total capacity of the storage device to which you want to back up.

You can create a zip file of all of the files that you want to back up by zipping the files you want to back up. (If you don't know how to zip a file, see the previous tutorials about Winzip in this series).

If the resulting zip file is less than 1.4 Megabytes in size, you can back the file up by copying it to a floppy disk (right-click and drag the file to your A: drive in Windows Explorer).

If the file is greater than 1.4 Megabytes, you'll need to find another storage device to copy it to. Possible targets:

• Another hard disk or internal device on your machine.
• An external device connected to your machine.
• Another computer connected to your machine via a LAN (local area network).
• A computer connected to your machine via the Internet.

Another hard disk or other internal device on your machine:

If your machine has more than one hard disk, you can safeguard against losing data files on one hard disk by zipping and copying files from that hard disk to a second hard disk.

If your machine has a CDR (CD Rewritable), a Zip drive, or other storage device, you can copy to that device. (The "Zip" in "Zip drive" as in Iomega Zip Drive has no connection with the term zip as in zip file or Winzip ).

An external device connected to your computer:

You can attach another storage device to your computer via your serial, parallel, or USB ports. Some examples:

• Attach another hard disk externally (see www.addonics.com).
• External tape drive
• External CDRW drive
• External Zip drive (Iomega Zip drive)

Another computer via LAN:

• If you are part of a LAN (Local Area Network) you can copy files from a hard disk on your machine to the hard disk on another machine.
• You can also connect your machine directly to another machine with a null modem cable. This will be covered in a separate tutorial.

Another computer via the Internet:

If you have an Internet connection, you can back up files to a number of locations. For example at www.yahoo.com you can sign up for a service called My Briefcase that allows you to upload up to 5 Megabytes of files to a folder on Yahoo. You can also sign up for more storage space for a fee.

There are a number of other services offering hard disk space for free or for a small cost.

If you would like to have selected files backed up automatically to an Internet folder, one service to check out would be www.backup.com

This tutorial has covered ways in which you can backup files from you hard disk by copying them to another storage device.

A number of programs exist to automate copying a selected group of files to another location on a regular basis. One such program is the Windows Backup program, covered in the next tutorial.