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	August 2003				doubleclick@alcress.com
		Double Click by Andrew Lang
			Backups (Part 2) One major question about backing up is 'How often?' How long is a piece of string? The first question to be asked is 'How much are you prepared to re-do?' If you have spent five hours doing a particular job and the system were to crash, you would need to start over from the last backup point. How much you are prepared to re-do, will determine how often you should backup, or make a copy of your work. Certainly, systems are now more reliable, and most crashes will only lose unsaved changes, but the catastrophic effect of a virus or a disk crash should not be discounted. A second type of backup is called 'archiving'. This is when a copy is taken and kept at a particular point in the process or at a particular time. The common one would be to take a copy of accounting files after the year-end processing. Like backups, these should be stored in an appropriate location away from the computer. Where they include financial information, a safety deposit box might be appropriate. It is also good to keep copies of programs you have purchased in a secure location.