Windows® 98 Unleashed

Some Thoughts on Real-World Backups

Before getting down to business, you need to ask yourself which files you want to include in the backup job. Your first inclination might be to back up all your drives just to be safe. This is fine if you have lots of room on your destination drive, whether it's a tape drive, another hard drive, or a network drive.

But what if you're backing up to a location with limited free space or even to floppy disks? Although Backup can compress your backed-up files so that they consume only about half their normal volume, that can still add up to hundreds of megabytes on a big system. And even a small hard disk contains enough data to fill a few dozen floppy disks. Shuffling that many disks in and out of your machine ...