Worth the Effort...

In our busy life, who has time to backup their computer, and how do we do it? Well, ask yourself, if my computer was stolen, or crashed, or infected beyond repair, what could I not live without? For me, my most valuable assets on my computer are music and photos. I have spent years building my music collection, and now most of it is on my computer. Picasa has an easy backup tool that compresses your photos and can burn them to CD; a couple hundred photos made it to 2 cd's for me.

For itunes, One Digital Life has a good article on the step by step process of burning your entire library to either dvd or cd. In 'edit' then 'preferences' (or Ctrl + comma), go to advanced tab, burning, and check 'Data CD.' Data cd's compact the digital files, and copy them exactly as the music is stored, so when you restore the music is intact. Unfortunately, I do not have a dvd burner, so I must backup all to cd's which is time-consuming, but not nearly as time-consuming as rebuilding an entire music collection. DVD's also can hold an enormous amount of data. To give you an example, my itunes library has approximately 5,000 songs. A dvd might take 5 discs to backup the entire collection. On cd, I'm looking at roughly 25 cd's, as the data burning puts on about 175 songs per cd. That's not bad if you consider burning a regular cd can get you 20 songs if you're lucky. While 25 cd's seems like a bulky number, blank cd's are about $.15 apiece these days, and think of how devastated you'd be if you lost your entire music library. Spend a couple of hours and you'll be thankful later.

One more tip: itunes will allow you to create smart playlists which will keep track of new songs that you add after you do the initial backup; that way you don't have to figure out where you left off, and can make future backups easily. Also, One Digital Life makes another good point to make a cd backup of the "itunes Library Folder", as well as the "itunes Library Folder.xml" located on your hard drive, so all of your original playlists and settings can be restored instantly.