By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post Staff Writer
March 27, 1998; Page N46

Don't worry about copying the contents of your entire hard drive — even if you must reinstall the Mac OS itself, almost all of your programs will still work. Instead, focus on backing up your own creations.

1) Buy an external Zip drive. You do not want to back up a full hard drive on floppies, nor is there much point in buying a Jaz drive that will be twice as expensive as the $150 Zip. Plus, a Zip is light enough to haul to another computer should yours become totally inoperative.

2) Get some software to do the backups for you. The best option is Connectix's Speed Doubler 8, which includes a "copy agent" in addition to its system-speedup tools. This $50 program is a snap to configure: Just select what to copy, where to copy it to, how to make those copies (the "smart copy" option saves time by only replacing files that have changed), and how often to back up things. Once a week should suffice.

The freeware Simple Backup is another, less effective option — it lacks any scheduling function, so you have to remember to use it, and is more confusing to configure. But unlike Speed Doubler 8, it works on older Macs and is, again, free. Download it at http://mirror.apple.com/Mirrors/info-mac/disk/simple-backup-14.hqx

3) There are three kinds of files you should back up every time:

a) Your documents. This is easy if you've saved all of your files in one folder (such as the "Documents" folder you can create by checking off a button in the lower right corner of the General Controls control panel). So do that.

b) Your e-mail. If you're using any version of Eudora, you'll normally want to back up the entire Eudora Folder, located within the System Folder. Other programs generally store mail in the same place as the mail program itself; the best way to find that is to use the "Find File" tool (in the Apple menu) to dig up folders called "Mail."

c) Your settings. That is, any program or system-wide settings that would be a pain to recreate from scratch, along with your Web browser bookmarks. Look in the Preferences sub-folder of the System Folder on your hard drive; if you see any of these files or folders there, put them on your backup list: