Who actually backup their computer? Maybe paranoid geeks or someone who has had their computer fried by lightning before…?

Touch wood, nothing actually happened to my computer. It was actually the better half who reminded me about backing up her notebook. I was surprised that she mentioned about backup. She normally only worries about her Ebay stuff, shopping and making lunches for the little ones. :-)

I am actually glad she wanted the backup to be done on a regular basis. In the past, I have only copied important docos, pics and home videos to a DVD-R when I have the mood or time. I have never done a regular backup.

Finished work today and went to a large local computer/entertainment store. I had my eyes on an external 2.5″ 320 Gigs hard disk(HD). The price on the box was $99 and I got it price-matched down to $74, which was the price I saw on some other catalog. Not bad eh.

In the package, there is the HD and a USB cable. There is no software included as this is the cheap-cheap package. I think the top-of-range ones have backup software but they cost more, quite a fair bit more actually.  Nevermind about not having any software, I googled “free backup software”, crawled through a few pages and eventually found Microsoft Synctoy. Downloaded the free software, installed it and within a few minutes, I have already figured out how to use this simple and effective piece of backup software.

I plugged the HD in a spare USB port, searched her notebook for a list of directories to backup and created a few “folder pairs” in Synctoy. Initially all the files in these folders from the notebook are copied across. From now on, only files that have changed will be copied across when the backup job starts.

“Happy missus happy family“.  A saying my friend told me, its so true! ;-)