3. What To Backup And How

There are some excellent and quite complex backup software packages out there. They are also fairly expensive. We assume you will be well satisfied backing up using a tool that's free, easy to use, and compatible with numerous versions of Windows. As an added bonus, our chosen tool confers the ability to transfer files to or from network shares. But before we dig into the tool itself, let's review some additional backup basics - namely, what kinds of notebook files and information you should back up.

What To Back Up On A Notebook Drive

In fact, you may not be after a straightforward backup on your notebook. For example, we "back up" our personal data (Outlook contacts and emails, Internet Explorer bookmarks, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc.) so that we can later "restore" this information to another Windows computer. This may be a new computer or a desktop computer we also work on. This is an unconventional way to use a backup, but it lets us move our working environment from one machine to another with very little time and effort involved. By the same token, this technique also creates duplicates of our important information even if we use it for other purposes. We can't be so bold as to call this outright migration, but backups can be used to migrate data from one Windows installation to another.

The Windows Registry hive contains tons of information about the hardware and software on your computer. It is another critical backup item. That's because a corrupt Registry entry can potentially lead some or all of your applications to fail. As a matter of best backup practice, it's very important to have the option to copy your Registry while backing up any Windows computer.

But here there be real dragons: most backup utilities including Microsoft's own can't handle merging potentially incompatible Registry entries from different backups. This is a case where a known good working snapshot is always your best bet, even though it can still pose problems when what's in the registry disagrees with what else is on a Windows machine. Every backup you do should include a full Registry backup if you expect to do a full system recovery from the backup.