#99 - PC Guru has PC blues

I came home today and started to work on my Desktop PC (the PC not the Mac Mini). It had been a bit sluggish lately and had locked up several times when trying to burn a DVD. Today it ran for 45 minutes then locked up. I never could get it to completely restart. I got into Safe Mode (hit that F8 key when you start up) and tried restoring to Monday's setup. It did the restore OK then locked up. I realized at this time that my last back up was August 17. So I pulled the hard drive from the PC and took it to my Bench PC and installed the Hard Drive. I made DVD backups and attached my external Hard Drive and made backups. I found my Outlook info and backed it up also. I then put the Hard Drive back in and it wouldn't start up at all. Lastly I took out the last memory chip I had installed (I had 640MB memory so I dropped back to 512MB). The PC immediately started up and here I am typing away.

I copied all my backups to my laptop so now I'm backed up everywhere (whew relief). I tell you all this faithful reader so that you will make sure your data is backed up today. If you have Outlook data do the File, Import/Export to a backup device of your entire Personal Folder. I'm just going to have to backup every other day instead of once a week.

My mom turned 80 today, so we are off to Ohio Friday to belatedly celebrate with my folks. See you next week!

#95 - Why is backing up your Outlook so tough?

Its always been a mystery to me why Outlook and Outlook Express have no easy way to backup the important data you have. In both programs you have to go to File, Import/Export and go through eight or nine clicks to backup the data. Its not easy and its not intuitive. Why would Microsoft make it so hard to save your data? You have important contacts, calendar items and emails that you would hate to lose. In fact I would say that some users have no more valuable data on their PC then their Outlook information. Every other program (not from Microsoft) have great backup features. Intuit programs (Quicken, QuickBooks) do a great job of reminding you when to back up and giving you control of where to backup. I've never got an answer that makes sense from Microsoft.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered an add in program from Microsoft that actually puts a Backup button on your Outlook File menu bar. (Sorry no such luck for Outlook Express users) Now it isn't the easiest program to add in so if you use Outlook and want a better way to backup your data click here: Outlook Backup Follow the directions and 2 downloads to make it work. Then pick your destination directory (we made a new Outlook Backup folder in our My Documents folder). Now why this isn't standard in Office and not a download is beyond me. Let me know how it goes!