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#1
Things you most need to back up
I have a home network with six computers, most of which are used for work. I've never had much trouble with losing data even though I don't use any kind of rigorous back up system. My preferred method of backing things up is just to make copies of important folders and store them on a network drive. I frequently change out hard drives and do a clean install of the OS if anything seems the least bit out of kilter. I would do that for instance if I found any virus or malware (almost never happens). I just put the old hard drive on the shelf in case I want to get something from it later. My primary application I'm running has it's own backup utility which is just for backing up files that I have created using it and some settings.
I don't care about backing up software since that can always be downloaded and reinstalled. I don't want to restore anything from a disk image or anything remotely like that. Here are the folders I make copies of so I can recreate my files if needed.
1) Every thing under C:\Users
2) C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore
3) Any files containing important data which are stored under the program folder.
Is there anything else I should be doing or am I just overlooking a way of doing this that would be vastly easier? I used Carbonite for a while, but finally decided I probably wouldn't be able to figure out how to restore something if I actually needed to.