 | |  | | By Sandy McMurray | |  | | Laura Smith lost everything in a flash. | | | When she left for work, her home computer was fine. When she came home, all the clocks in the house were blinking 12:00, and her computer was dark. There had been a lightning storm that day. | | | "My kids tend to check their e-mail in the morning," says Smith, a special needs teaching assistant for the Peel District School Board in Mississauga, Ont. "The computer was on when I left for work and it was not on when I |
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| | came home. When I tried to start it there was a burning smell and smoke. Everything inside it was fried." | | | Smith lost both professional and personal data in that storm. The computer held the only copies of her family's e-mail messages, school projects and letters. "All our stuff was gone," she says. "The computer had to be replaced." | | | Eventually, everyone faces a data disaster. Are you ready? Unless all of your electronic files are expendable, you should be making backup copies of your most important data on a regular basis. | |
| | "Your backup is as important as your data and your time - because that's what it's going to cost you if you lose it," says Cheryl Frogley-Rawson, a Toronto based IT consultant with Helpin' Out, a computer support company for small businesses and individuals." Even if you have hard copies, it's going to cost you time to enter the information again." | | | "You have to think of the worst-case scenario and do backups for that," she says. "Plan for a hard drive crash and make sure that base is covered." | | | Copying and duplicating files | | | The key to a successful backup is getting a copy of your data off your hard drive. Focus on protecting your personal files like letters, projects, sent e-mail messages, your e-mail address book and any other information that is essential. | | | Don't try to copy programs like Microsoft Word or Outlook - they can be reinstalled from the original |
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| | CDs you purchased. Likewise, the operating system software - Windows itself and any software provided by your computer maker - can usually be recovered from the installation or "System Restore" CDs that came with the computer. | |
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