Most people think that backing up their data once a month is more than sufficient, or they think that backing up data is nonsense in the first place. Though in some cases backing up data once a month may be a viable solution because not much data has changed over that time period, but what if you have many files that have been changed during the course of the month? As you near the end of the cycle, you accumulate more and more data while increasingly running the risk that one day your hard drive may stop functioning. If this happens, all of that newly accumulated data is now lost and you're stuck buying a new hard drive. You might as well lessen the pain of the kick in the balls by implementing a good solid backup regiment that takes care of your data on a regular basis, without regular intervention from you, the user.

Over the last several years I have been using the built in program known as NT Backup that Microsoft has included with NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. In order to run this program, go to Start > Run > and type in "ntbackup" and hit enter. Since this program is already installed on your computer, is free to use, and does a respectable job when it comes to backing up data, you might as well utilize this tool and save some money and spare yourself the agony of lost or corrupt data.

NTBackup is very simplistic in its design. Upon starting the application, it begins in what it calls "Wizard mode" which guides you through backing up data from your computer. The only downside to using NTBackup is the fact that it does not currently support writing backups to removable media such as CD RWs or DVD Rs. However, this can be done after the backup process has completed.

There are several ways that you can go about backing up your data:

Full backup: This is the obvious approach of simply taking all of the files and copying them to another location (Or in NTBackup's case to a large archive with a .bkf extension) each and every time the backup process is initialized.
Incremental: This is good when you lack the time or perhaps system resources to do a full backup each and every time you wish to back up data. An incremental back up will keep track of what has already been backed up. Upon the next iteration of the process, it will compare the date of the files in the existing backup archive to the date of the files on the target disk. If the date on the disk is more recent than the date of the file in the archive, it gets backed up, if not, it's omitted from the backup.
Daily: This back up scheme will simply back up all files that have either been modified or created on today's date.

You maybe asking yourself at this point in time which back up solution is right for you. When deciding which approach to take, there are several things that you should take into consideration.

---