Backing up your computer is essential. Hard drives fail and sometimes data cannot be recovered. If your computer is stolen, you also have a backup of all of your documents. Backing up is easy at St. Edward's. The best place to store a backup copy of all of your important documents and email is to save a copy on your personal EdShare account. The EdShare server is also backed up nightly so you will always be able to recover documents stored there. You may also backup to CD's or USB drives.

How to back up My Documents in Windows XP

1. Move all documents to the My Documents folder. This is the standard storage directory/folder in Windows for documents. If you save all of your documents in this directory it will be easy to find them and to back them up.
2. To access My Documents go to the Start Menu and select My Documents. The My Documents directory is stored in C:\Documents and Settings\”your username” folder\My Documents. For example: My user name for the computer is brendaa so My Documents is found in C:\Documents and Settings\brendaa\My Documents.
3. To backup files in My Documents, open My Documents and then go to the Edit menu and click on Select All. If you only want to backup selected files or folders from My Documents, select the documents and/or folders by holding the Control key and clicking on the documents and/or folders.
4. Once your documents are selected click on the Edit menu at the top of the window and select Copy.
   * From the Documents folder, you may also click and drag the folders or documents you want to back up to your destination folder. If you have individual documents saved on your desktop screen, then you should be able to click and drag them to your destination folder, as well.
5. Open the EdShare folder or drive (USB or CD) to which you are backing up your documents. Click on the Start menu and select My Computer. Your EdShare personal folder should be listed as 'username' on 'Steds File Share (edShare) (S:). Double click on the drive to open it. If you are backing up to CD or USB drive, select that drive and double click on it.
6. Click on the Edit menu at the top of the window and select Paste. This will copy all of the documents selected in Step 3 to the drive (EdShare or CD/USB).

Another alternative for individual documents is to save them to the destination you wish to back them up in. This is always good to do with documents that are of high importance.

To do this, open the document and click on File > Save As > and then select the destination in the Save In field and click the Save button.