Backing up your logical drives and partitions can be somewhat of a daunting task. It is much easier to have software do it for you. Just a few clicks of the mouse and your data is backed up all in one neat tidy little space on your hard drive. From there it can be passed on to a CD, USB storage device, or other form of data backup storage.

If you need plenty of storage space available for your data, you may opt to go with some less traditional means of data backup. This may include DVDs or an offsite server. Both provide large amounts of storage when compared to a CD which only holds around 800 mb. Of course USB sticks are coming down in price and available in large capacity form for very little money.

Tape drives were at one point the de facto standard in data backup devices, however now they are more for servers than home computer users. Because tape drives offer more space and can be erased and rewritten many times gives the person that is backing up the data peace of mind that he does not need change the disc or worry about if it will fit.

Of course when backing up your data, its important to know, what is actually a necessity to backup and what is basically garbage. For most users, photos and critical system files top the list. However every user is not the same. Lets say you are a videographer, some of your video files need to be saved or you could risk losing them. Or for a photographer, images or pictures can be lost. And for writers, Losing that masterpiece novel you've been working on for two years can't be a good thing.

But what about critical system files? Do you know which ones you'll actually need and which ones you do not? Most users don't know. My recommendation would be to use a disk image manager that will record the entire hard disk in case something goes wrong. Be sure to read the documentation on how to recover from such an event. Because if something were to happen, you'll need to know how to get what you've got backed up back onto your new hard drive.

Backup your data and keep it in a safe place. Once you've backed up all your data. Or the most critical files at least, you may need software to install everything back onto the new hard drive. That's why it's very important to keep this information handy and out of harms way.

If other people have access to the place you store your data backup, you may want to encrypt data on the backup device. There are many programs that are available to do this and most are not expensive. Some are even free! Just remember the password or you will not be able to access the data that backed up!

So in essence, how we backup is just as important as what we back up. For more on Data Backups