Tell me about backing up, restore points and generally looking after my PC

[SlightlyMadSweet]

Right.

I do "back up" my buisiness data by sticking a memory stick (or CD for photos) in once a month and copying the files to the devce.

What else should I be doing? Restore points? Is there an automated way to back-up data thingy - how does it work?

How often/do/should you do it?

I am on VIsta (Buisiness)

If you are backing up once a month, you are doing more than most people. You can schedule this so that you don't have to remember - it might be easier to do if you have an external hard drive though, so that it can monitor what has been changed and therefore what needs to be copied over.

The frequency is a balance between how long it takes and how important the data is. Businesses usually back up once a day.

Restore points are generated automatically.

Well I aim to do it once a month....Usually about 6weeks.

But this is buisness data which we have lost in the past so we have had our fingers burnt in the past.

A complete disk backup every so often might be a good thing. If you have a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive you can use Seagate Disk Wizard to do the backups.

I use a programme called 'goodsync' to protect my data (mostly digital photos of family which are irreplacable).

DH installed an additional hard drive into the pc and this programme checks for new or updated files and folders that I specified to check and back-ups any changes to sceondary hard drive every 6 hours automatically.

This programme gives several different options to back-up to (external hdd's, networks etc) and was cheap as chips.

I would highly recommend it.