September 9th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
I’m tina, also known as -t- from Recommended. This week I have the pleasure of hanging out with you and Foo at The Foo Logs. He has graciously invited me to prepare a guest post during my stay.
I’ve decided to post about my routine or rather the routine of my beloved laptop. Having played and worked with computers for several years I have experienced my share of crashes and loss of data. And I have learned that one thing cannot be repeated too many times: backup your data and protect your computer from malware and viruses. We all know it. But apparently some people think it’s a complicated and nasty task. I don’t think so.
The most simple thing is to have a second partition on your hard drive or a second hard drive within your PC on which you store all of your data. If for some reason you have to reinstall your system, the data partition or secondary hard drive will not be affected. And if the whole drive fails to work, chances are only the system partition is affected and the data can still be recovered by connecting it to another PC and attempting to read the drive.
However, there is always some data stored within the user profile which is located on the system partition. Once a week, on Friday nights, I have all this data (C:\documents & settings\my user profile) and all data on my data partition backed up to an external hard drive. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I backup my mail and browser data from the system partition to my data partition during lunch break. And of course I use MozBackup [http://www.mozbackup.org/] to make sure all of my specific browser settings, including extensions and stored passwords, are never lost. This is the only program I start manually whenever I made important changes.
For the automatic backups I use Cobian Backup [http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm], a free program which works flawlessly. It allows you to set a day and time at which the backup starts running. Of course you can specify exactly which files are being backed up, where they are copied to and whether or not they shall be zipped or password protected.
Friday to Saturday I have a virus scan running overnight. Here my choice is Norton Systemworks. The program is set up to automatically update its virus definitions and everything else whenever necessary during the week. To find viruses it scans the whole system, including the external hard drive, which takes about three hours. But since I’m asleep I don’t care. Norton also defrags my partitions during the weekend nights.
I have Ad-Aware [http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/] programmed to start up on Sunday morning. I did this by adding the program to the scheduled tasks which can be done within the system control. It’s really easy since the assistant takes you through every single step of the setup. So, on Sundays, before I take my shower and have breakfast, I update the Ad-Aware definitions and start the full system scan.
And that’s it. My system is clean and backed up. And how much work did I have with that? Less than five minutes during the whole week and about an hour to set up all the required programs.
2 Responses to “Guest Post: My Routine”
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kristarella said: @ 7:52 pm
September 9th, 2006
Wow. Awe inspiring… I’m not using windows anymore so some of that doesn’t apply but if I were I’m sure I’d be hop-footing it to set my computer up to get rid of those nasties.
The Foo Logs » Blog Archive » Guest Posts on The Foo Logs Pinged With: @ 7:25 pm
October 20th, 2006
[…] I have recently thought of opening up my blog to accommodate guest posts more often as it just adds an extra different flavor to The Foo Logs. I did have -T- from Recommended write one for me months ago but haven’t pursued the idea further. I am probably going to have 1 guest post every month for now. […]