How to back up your laptop

The University provides online space for backing up your academic work. Space on your H: drive is limited to 150MB of storage, which should be enough to back up your Word or WordPerfect documents. If you back up your documents from your laptop to your H: drive, they will be available from any lab computer AND stored on backup tape if something critical happens. There are instructions below on how to back up documents to your H: drive.

Be aware that there is NOT enough space on the H: drive to back up your music files, pictures, or video collection. If these things are important to you, you should back them up onto an external USB hard drive. You may pick any vendor, but here are two drives we like for under $100:

• Lacie 40GB Hard Drive
• iOmega 80GB Hard Drive

How to back up to the H: Drive

1. You can store all your documents on the H: Drive. They will be backed up every night and are accessible from any public PC on campus. If you have broadband access from home and NetDrive or the Novell Client, you can log into our novell servers, and have complete access to the H: Drive. If you do not have broadband, you can also use Office XP to FTP files to and from your H: Drive. (See the Off-campus link.)
   
   
2. You can also store all your documents on your laptop, and use the H: drive as a backup location. To do so:
   • Create a folder in your H: Drive called "BackUp" [h:ackup]
   • Click on BACKUP.EXE, save the file to your computer and run it. It will put the backup scripts in C:Program Files AND it will put a shortcut on your desktop.
   • To manually run the back-up, simply click on the icon on your desktop.
   • To run the back-up when you log in, simply copy the shortcut on your desktop to your "Start Up" folder in All Programs
   • NOTE: This method will clear the archive bit when you copy files. If you plan on using another backup solution, it may not copy the fiiles you need. If this is the case, come see Technology Services for a fix.
   
   
3. [Optional] NOTE: The backup is already configured to IGNORE items in "My Music" and in "My Pictures", and also ignore "*.mp3" files and "*.jpg" files. To edit this or to exclude additional file types:
   • Open the file c:Program FilesExclude.txt with Notepad
   • To change which files/folders get exluded, you can edit the exclude.txt file.
   • In the file, each line of the file should have a string. When any of the strings match any part of the absolute path of the file to be copied, that file will be excluded from being copied. For example, specifying a string like music or .mp3 will exclude all files underneath the directory MUSIC or all files with the .mp3 extension respectively.
     
   
   
4. [Optional] If you have Windows XP, you can also schedule a task to run every few hours. To do so:
   • Go to the Control Panel [Start, Control], Select "Performance and Maintenance", Click "Scheduled Tasks"
   • Select "Add Scheduled Task". The Schedule Wizard starts.
   • Click Browse, and find c:program filesackup.bat
   • Set the task to run Daily, starting at 8AM (or whenever you wake up...), click next
   • Enter your password, then click on "Open Advanced Properties...."
   • Pick the Schedule tab, select advanced
   • Click on "Repeat Task", every 1 Hour (set your own schedule), for a duration of 12 hours. What this does is start at 8AM (from step D above), and then every hour backup will run, until 12 hours have passed (8 PM). So adjust the times to fit your work schedule.
   • Hit OK...you are now finished!
   
   
5. Finally, make sure the files are getting copied by checking h:ackup.