5. Software for making back-ups

The simplest way to back up would be drag and drop your folders on to an external storage device such as a hard disk or a memory stick.

But being human, we soon forget to do it night after night. After all, backing up data is not the most interesting thing to do on a computer!

So specialist backup software packages have been developed to make it much easier and virtually automatic.

After installing the application, it will ask you what type of backup do you want to set up - full, incremental, disk image and so on.

Then it asks you where is the backup to be stored. For example on to another computer on the network, or maybe an external hard drive.

Finally it will ask you when should the backup take place - perhaps once a day at 8am or perhaps every time you log on. There are many choices.

And to make sure the storage device doesn't fill up with endless backups, it may ask you how many backups to do before the oldest one is automatically deleted. This is very handy for fixed size hard disks.

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: Professional backup application