Putting It All Together

In this section, we walk through a possible scenario for two different users to give you an idea or two on which methods would work best for you. Let's take a look at two user profiles:

• User 1 profile User 1 is a college student. He wants to back up his files about once per week. He has several gigabytes of music files that he has purchased over the years, most of which are stored on an external hard drive today. User 1 uses his PC mostly to work on his Master's thesis, which if lost, would basically end his life. This user wants to safely back up his music and store it all away from his apartment. He also wants to keep his thesis work backed up (which is updated often). Because he has an external hard drive, he also wants to back up his user files.

• User 2 Profile User 2 is a homeowner with a spouse and a teenager. All three people in the house have a dedicated PC, and she wants to back them all up onto a single device. She also has about 1 GB of critical files that she wants to keep backed up and very secure.

First let's look at User 1. Given that User 1 already has an external hard drive, he decides to back up his user files directly to this hard drive. If his PC gets infected with a virus, his files can all be recovered. In addition to backing up his PC files this way, he decides to borrow a friends DVD-R writer, and he stores all his music files on DVDs, which he keeps in a box in the trunk of his car. This way, if his apartment burns down, he still has all his music (which for a college kid is pretty important). Finally, because his degree and possibly his financial future depends on his thesis, he decides to back up these files on his external hard drive, but he also keeps an updated copy on a Flash drive, which he keeps attached to his keychain. The Flash drive is both password protected and has a fingerprint ID so that if he loses the Flash drive no one will be able to view or steal his work.

Next let's look at User 2. This user needs to back up more than one PC, so she uses a network-based storage device that plugs directly into the back of her wireless router. A backup routine is set up in Windows XP, and now wherever the PCs in the home happen to be (as long as it is in range of the router), the backup routines will back up everyone's files to the network storage device. This user also has some very important files and to be as certain as possible that no harm will come to them she subscribes to an online backup and storage service. She pays an annual fee of $150, which is expensive, but she has the piece of mind that whatever she backs ups to this service is as safe as a file can be.