By ignorant, I mean someone who has never "gotten burned" by not having a backup. You will never find a more devoted "backer-upperer" than someone who has lost hundreds of hours of work, and/or their "people inventory" - their contacts. It's one of the most painful lessons you will ever learn in your life. In this article, I hope to save a few people from having to learn it the hard way.

I've been using a product called EazyBackup for years now, and it has saved my bacon a couple times, as well as made transitioning from one computer to the next, nice and easy.

Some people copy the entire contents of their computer's hard drive onto another drive, as a backup. I decided some time ago that I did not want to back up my entire hard drive. When I get a new computer, I don't want to dump everything from my old computer, onto my new one. My existing computer has developed it's own little problems throughout it's use, and I don't want to bring them onto the new one. Also, my old computer ends up with software that I no longer use, and those programs I don't want on my new computer. I just want my data, for the programs I do still use.

There are 3 sets of data I am concerned with. One that I want is everything in my "My Documents" folder. ALL my data, including photos, music, Publisher Files, Word, Access, Excel, Power Point, and the like is in my "My Documents" folder. 

The other set of data is all the separate programs that have their own backup utilities, like Outlook, Agent Office, Quickbooks, etc. With those, you can back up each program individually using their own utility. I can "point" those individual backups to store their data in my My Documents folder for some of them, but not all. And that's time consuming getting them all done individually! So the other option is to back up each of those program's data files, without using their individual internal utilities.  

The third set of data is one that I hadn't even considered before I started using this program, which admittedly was many yeras ago. That is:

Historically, backup programs assume that the user has intimate knowledge of (a) what data to backup, and (b) where to find the data. The average backup program supplies the user with some type of list of all of the files available on the PC and the user then has to figure out which ones to back up. For instance, many people back up the ".PST" file and think they now have a complete backup for Outlook. Not true. The .PST file does not include your "Message Rules' (filters), or "Signature Files" as well as some other things you definitely want backed up from Outlook.

Eazy Backup is a departure from the traditional backup program. Eazy Backup has built in logic to backup and restore various software applications (e.g., Microsoft® Outlook). That is, Eazy Backup knows where the critical data is located and knows what data must be included to make an effective backup for an application. This relieves the user from having to figure out which data to back up (and wondering if the selection is correct). Equally importantly, Eazy Backup also knows how to restore to the proper location. Restoring data is often more difficult than making the backup - especially when restoring to a machine with a different version of Windows.

The reason I like this backup utility is that this software knows where to get the files for those programs you SHOULD be backing up frequently. Instead of having to go into each of the following individual software programs, and do THEIR backup, or having to know which files to back up for each of those programs, this will do them all in one shot.  Oh yeah, and you can schedule it, and have it write to a CD, DVD, external drive, or any other device which you have the capability of doing a 'direct write' to.  What programs does it already know which files to back up?

And if it doesn't work on one of your programs - they may add it for you! They are constantly adding programs requested by users.

The other thing is that it is EASY to use. It brings up a window that lists all of the above programs that you have on your computer, and asks if you want to back them up. You just uncheck any you do NOT want to back up, and away it goes! It doesn't get much easier.

Last, but far from least, is the companies excellent tech-support. If you're having problems getting it set up, they'll help. But you probably won't need it!