Backup HowTo

Windows registry maintains lots of information about your operating system. For example, it records the installed software, whether or not the CDROM can play automatically, etc. Many softwares add some information into the registry during their installation, or change some items. Sometimes it will cause some problems. For example, some softwares cannot run. Perhaps it is because the registry is damaged. Therefore, if you have backed up the Windows registry, you can try to restore it. Maybe it can solve the problems.

Several days ago I wrote some articles that introduced "cron" - an time-based utility for executing some programmes on time. With "cron" you can backup some files automatically. However, "cron" is a Unix/Linux software so Windows users can not use it. In this article, I will introduce a Windows backup utility that can backup your files on time, like "cron". It is called "Cobian Backup".

Gmail Backup is a small utility for backing up the Emails in your Gmail account. You can use it to download all the Emails from Google and save them as *.eml files. On Windows, you can open these files with Outlook Express. Also, Gmail Backup can restore these *.eml files to your Gmail account. It is similar to "uploading".

What should you do after installing Windows operating system? I guess the answer is to install a variety of drivers, especially for the old version of Windows. Video card, sound card, wireless network card, micro-camera... All need their own drivers so then can work. Obviously it is a very dirty work. If a software utility can backup the drivers when the system is well, and reinstall all the drivers after reinstalling the operating system, the world would become better.

"rsync" is a simple but powerful backup utility in Linux. Although the traditional archive tool "tar" can make a backup, "rsync" supports more functions, for example, saving the backup on a remote machine. For incremental backups, rsync provides a better method than "tar".

Online backup storage are very popular backup solutions. They have many good features. Your files are available from anywhere (if there is a web access) and the files are secured from floods, fire disasters or robbery in your house. Web operating systems are interested projects which brings the complete desktop to your web browser. Now you can use them as a specific online backup storage.

In the two previous articles I introduced two common used utilities in Linux operating system, tar and cron. "tar" is used for creating archive files and "cron" is a time-based scheduling utility. In this article, I will combine "tar" with "cron" to solve the problem: how to backup your files automatically?

MySQL is a free, open source database management system. It is used widely in the Internet. Some famous companies, such as Yahoo!, choose MySQL as their databases. Most of web hosting companies provide MySQL and there are many free scripts like WordPress, Joomla that use MySQL. As it is widely used in the Internet and the data is important, it is a very useful skill to master how to backup your MySQL database.

Windows Live Writer is a blog writing tool. It provides a powerful editing environment, like a simple MS Word. You can use it to write on your own computer and after finishing a post just click the publish button. The post will be published.

Thunderbird is an E-mail client developed by Mozilla Foundation. You can receive, send, manage you mails with it. Also, it contains address book and supports extension, like Firefox. Since E-mail important for some people, backing up Thunderbird's data in time is a good habit.