A friend of mine, Darina shared her laptop has been slowly dying. When it quit one day, she purchased another computer and whipped out her backup hoping to jump back online and into the full swing of business in a jiffy. Unfortunately, the backups won’t restore 🙁

You know, this has happened to me once before. I can’t even remember if I used the built in backup feature or a third party backup software. The bottom line is, I found out many of these backup software save the backup a sort of proprietary format. Which means if the software can’t open that file you’re left holding the bag. Since then, I’ve quit doing that kind of fancy backups and instead, make copies of existing files instead.

I do have one backup software to automate things for me but I make sure it saves the backup in regular ZIP format. This way, I can use any ZIP utility to restore files quickly and from anywhere on any computer including the Mac.

Then my 2nd line of defense is to use Syncback SE a great software. First, I copied all data to an external hard drive, then I tell Syncback SE to watch certain data folders on a daily basis. If there’s anything new or changed to copy the file to the external hard drive. So in effect, I have a live backup that can be plugged into any computer or laptop.

What’s sweeter is, since the external hard drive is sorta self built, it cost me under $100 for a 160GB drive, no rebates, no coupons etc very nice 🙂

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