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Agenda

  Day One

   Hardware Vs. Software
   Static Electricity
   Heat
   Useful Tools
   Hardware

DayTwo – notes

    Software

   Backing up your Data
    External Backup Drives
    RAID Arrays
    Backup Software
    Backup Types

Day Three – notes

Day Four – notes

   Organize your Software

   Malicious Software

Related Resources

Reference Pages

The easiest way to make backups is to buy an external Hard Drive, which plugs in using the USB port on your computer. Many of these come with special software that will automatically make backups from time to time. The thing to remember about this method though, is that the data is on another Hard Disk. The external Hard Disk is prone to failure as well. It is possible, although not very likely, that both drives could fail at the same time.

Some DVD Writers also come with Backup software. I like this idea better because you can take the DVD's with your data on them and place them in a Safety Deposit Box if the information is important enough. However, if you have a lot of information, it may get spread across many disks. This can be time consuming as you need to keep changing the disk in the drive each time it fills one up.

There are a couple of other ways to backup your data, but I do not know that they translate well to home use. The first is backup tapes. These can be unstable and expensive.