Saving all your data?

Having just got through a forced and unplanned re-install of the Operating System on my PC, it brings home to me the importance of having good backups of ALL the data required to get a PC back into a workable condition.

Taking backups of application data for a company should be standard practise, but what about all the other marginal elements that a user relies upon - are they being saved in any format. Here are a few of the things I am thinking about:-
- e-mail accounts, passwords and log-on details to e-mail servers
- e-mail folder structures
- e-mail anti-spam rules
- the e-mails themselves within the application
- web browser Favourites, cookies and passwords
- options and preferences for applications that don't hold databases etc.
- application installs taken from the web
- upgrades and new releases to applications
- registry entries
- file and folder listings
- etc.

Applications like Outlook, IE and RegEdit have built in Export/Import menu options to save/re-establish settings and user configurations. I strongly suggest that you start using them (if not already doing so) and putting the resulting exported files into a location that is backed up and archieved off of the PC.

When installing a new application or an upgrade, don't run the program from the web but save the file to a suitable folder (C:\Downloads\AppName) and include this folder is your backup/archieve.

Luckily I have been doing this, so recover went well - even so it took 2 days. The only problem I encountered was that I rely on a bit of software that MS no longer supports, thus one of the first upgrades/patches was no longer available from its website. Had to use Google to locate another source before being able to continue. Now I have added it to my backup data.

One of the things that helped the most during the recovery was a list of folders and their files. This I had started creating on a regular basis; for entirely different reasons; a couple of months back using VBScript and the File System Object. The list help me identify missing applications, folders, files and versions.

I strong recommend ensuring that if you encounter a major disk/PC problem you have the necessary information and backups to help recover from it with as little hasle as possible.
Remember, PCs are cheap when compared to the cost of re-establishing all the data they hold!