Backup should be an essential part of your computing experience if you spend great amounts of time on your computer and/or use your computer for important personal or business dealings. There are too many stories of people who have lost all of their files due to system crashes or computer viruses to ignore. When you backup your files, you are storing your files separately from your computer.

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Why Do I Need to Backup My Files?

Don't fall into the old paradigm of "it will never happen to me." While there is certainly a chance that you will never have a need for the backups you make of your files, if something does happen to your computer you will certainly be glad that you have them. And you do not have to backup your entire computer, although this is certainly something that many people do, but only the files that are of the most importance to you.
Some things are easily replaced, and there is no need to backup these sorts of things, but those irreplaceable documents or files that are yours and yours alone should be saved in a place where they cannot be damaged. That way, no matter what happens to your computer, you can have security in the fact that all of your files are available in backup.

There are many possible methods for backing up your files. Floppy diskettes are a very common way, although this is somewhat falling by the wayside as computers are using floppy drives less and less. It is not uncommon to not see a single computer with a floppy disk drive on display when you go to the computer store to buy a new computer. CD-Rs are an excellent method for backing up your files.
CD-Rs and CD-RWs allow hundreds of times more storage space than a floppy disk could ever hope to have, and with increasingly faster CD burners they are becoming faster and easier to use all the time. It is possible to save 800 MB of data onto a CD in only minutes, and for many people they can backup every file of import on their computer onto a single CD.
This is far easier than have stacks of floppy disks lying around your computer desk which you must dig through any time you are trying to find a particular file that you have saved in backup.
Online backup is another excellent method for the backing up of your files. This allows you to store your files online, where there are no need for disks or CDs, and you can simply download your files back onto your computer whenever you want.
Whatever method you choose, remember that backing up your files is very important, and make sure that you do so to protect against the worst.

The easiest backup procedure for your personal files begins with a blank CD, and takes five minutes of your time.

To begin while in Windows XP, you will of course need to place a blank CD-R disc in your CD writer's drive. A few seconds later, you will be presented with a small dialog box giving you several options of what you wish to do with the blank disc.
Select the first option, "Open a writeable CD folder" and presto. You now should have a window on your desktop that is waiting to be filled with backup copies of all of your important personal files.
To make a backup of any file, simply open another Explorer window in the location of the specific file(s). An example of one such location would be; C:/Backup/Pictures/.
Once you have both folders open (the blank CD folder, and the folder containing your files) simply drag the files you wish to make a backup copy from its original folder to the blank CD folder. Now your system will reserve space on the CD for the specific file, and make a copy of the file to a temporary folder, thus leaving the original file intact and completely unchanged.
The great thing about the drag and drop interface is the fact that you can drag one, two, or hundreds of files and drop them into the CD folder at anytime. This is perfect if you have a great amount of files that you wish to make backup copies of.
Once you have completed selecting the files you wish to backup, you may want to take a few minutes and organize the CD folder's files in folders, or even rename some files. These actions can easily be completed within the CD folder's window in the same manner as they would be completed in any other Explorer folder.

Because, as of right now, your files are still in a temporary folder waiting to be written to the disc. To make sure that the CD is written correctly, it is advised that you close any other running programs on your system.
Now, you are ready to finally make a hard backup of your files. In the left hand side of the CD folder, you will find the text 'Write these files to CD', followed by 'Delete temporary files'. If you wish to begin the CD writing adventure, click the first. If you have decided that you abandon your backup project, simply click on the 'Delete temporary files' and the space on your hard drive used for the temporary files will be freed. Follow the on screen instructions in the CD Writing Wizard window, and in minutes you will have a backup copy of your personal files.
Now that you have seen how easy it is to make backup copies of your personal files, you have no excuse not to make monthly backups of your personal files. One last thing to keep in mind, however is that this method is to make backup copies of your personal files. This method should not be used to backup your system files such as Windows.