Extension Office Backup Instructions

General Information

The backup tutorials linked from this page have been developed to assist the cooperative extension personnel with obtaining a backup of their critical data. Remember, you are the owner of the data on your computer, and you are ultimately responsible for that data.

The tutorials are here to help as many people as possible, but may not encapsulate everyone's specific backup needs. If you need additional help or these tutorials are not sufficient enough for you to learn the backup process, please contact the Athens OIT Helpdesk at 706-542-2139 or oithelp@uga.edu. .

Backup Information

The two most important goals of these tutorials is to have people become responsible for their data and to assist them in backing up their data. Below are brief explanations of three methods to obtain a backup, and on the left of this page are the links to the tutorials for each method. Implement whichever backup works best for you and the resources you have available. The primary set of data for most personnel to backup is listed below, and the tutorials assist with locating this data. If your pc contains the Quickbooks file, please make sure to add this file to your backup. The default location of this file is C:\Program Files\Intuit\Quickbooks, and will be named “company name”.qbw, where “company name” = your Quickbooks file name.

1. My Documents
2. Desktop
3. Favorites (from Internet Explorer)
4. Outlook (or Pegasus)

The first and desired backup procedure includes an external hard drive with at least 250 GB of storage that is consistently connected to the computer with an automated backup scheduled through the Iomega Backup software. This is the preferred method as the minimum 250GB drive should be able to hold all your critical data; the backup process requires little day to day work; the backup verification and maintenance is relatively simple. The instructions to setup this type of backup are on the left of the page labeled ‘Automated Backup to External Hard Drive.’

The second backup procedure is better suited if you do not have an external hard drive that is at least 250 GB, or if the external hard drive will not be consistently connected to the computer. A higher capacity flash drive is also acceptable with this method. Using one of these storage media types, a manual backup can be made to the device. Keep in mind with the lower capacity drives it may not be possible to backup all of your data, so you would need to choose which data is most critical to you. The instructions for implementing this type of backup are on the left of the page labeled ‘Manual Backup to External/Flash Drive.’

The last backup procedure is to make a manual copy of your files to a CD or DVD. CD backups can be less viable as the media is less flexible for changes and rewrites. However, CD backups are great for archival type backups of things like pictures and old documents that still need to be kept but will not be updated. The instructions for this type of backup are on the left of the page labeled ‘Manual Backup to CD/DVD.’