Backups are extremely important, yet they are often neglected, because they involve some work. But in a case of emergency, missing, not working or badly organized backups can entail severy financial loss for a company and lots of trouble and expenditure of time for private users.

 That's why the following general advice should always be adhered to:

•Basically: Private data – Office documents, fotos and media files – always belong on their own hard disk partition, and not on the operating system's partition

•Backups should be run regularly.

•At least one backup should be kept in a different location.

•Several backups from different times should be available.

•The backups should be created on external mediums (USB hard drive, CD-RW, DVD or Tape) and not just on different partitions on the built-in hard drive.

•If you want to use CDs or DVDs for long-term storage of important data, you should check from time to time if your discs are still readable. Burned CD/DVD/Blu-Ray discs only last for a few years.

•The best backup is useless in a case of emergency if the restoration does not work or you don't know how to do it. Therefore: test and learn the restoratino process with test data!

•Make a resonable selection of the data you want to back up. For example, backing up program installations is often not required because you will can simply re-install the program. Most important are files that you created yourself.

•To minimize data volume and backup time, you can delete unused or outdated files prior to backup.

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