Backup Success Story

Subscriber James McClellan wrote to let me know he was finally successful with backing up...

Terry, I hadn't been able to get my external back-up drive to work since buying a new dell. At your recommendation, I tried Karen's Replicator ( www.karenware.com ) It worked great and I'm now doing daily backups to the external drive. I sleep much better thanks to you and Karen.

Thanks for the good news, James. I'm glad you got the backups going. As I've written numerous times, I run Karen's Replicator on all my Windows computers so that I can back up my data files easily. Those file backps keep me out of trouble — not the hardware failure kind of trouble, but the brain-freeze trouble. Ever make a temporary change to a file(for example, an experimental change) and then accidentally save it over the original? Those backups come in really handy.

If you don't have an external drive, they've gotten very cheap - check them out. If you have a second hard drive in the same computer, that can still be a backup to help protect your data. If you have a network, Replicator can copy to another computer on the network.

Even if you only have one hard drive and don't have a home network, Replicator can still save you from problems. Instead of copying to folder on another drive (or another computer's drive), just copy to another folder on your one hard drive. It won't save you from problems if the drive dies, but it will give you a chance to recover from the much more common "User Brain Error" that all too often messes up a file.

Copyright © 2008 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.