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How important are your saved favorite sites, cookies, or feeds? I am quite sure that everyone repeats visits to same sites or adds certain sites to his/her favorite bunch! What happens if you lose all these links or need to work from another computer while having the same shortcuts? All you need to do is a simple backup of these settings and you can restore them to a new machine and have all your favorites with you! The technical term used is export and import your Internet browser settings and the following steps will show you how to perform such steps using Internet explorer and Mozilla Firefox:

Saving your Internet Explorer favorites, cookies, and feeds:

1. Open Internet Explorer and press the keyboard key ALT to display the menu bar
2. Click Import and Export… from the File menu item
   
3. Select Export to a file and click Next
4. Select all three options, that is, Favorites, Feeds and Cookies and click Next
5. Select the top folder Favorites or any sub-folder if you just need one and click Next
6. Click Next to the file location screen while taking a note of the location
7. Again, click Next to the feeds file location and click Export while leaving the default location for the cookies file

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Custom Search

I have heard of people losing long word documents during power failures or could not recover documents due the lack of knowledge about Office auto recovery options. Personally, I had one or two incidents with older versions of Microsoft’s Word. This can happen to you and no matter how keen you are on data backups if your Office Word or Excel settings are incorrect or you have no idea how these are configured!

In my opinion, Word and Excel general parameters are somewhat tricky to find in the new versions of Microsoft’s Office. The tricky part is that you normally miss the tab Word options when clicking the Office button as your attention is on other parts of the menu window! I would not consider this location for such an important feature during an application usability exercise!

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Custom Search

The Native backup utility found in Windows XP operating systems helps you protect data from accidental loss if your system experiences hardware or storage media failure. The backup storage medium can be any local drive but I recommend using a separate storage device such as, a removable disk or a large capacity USB drive. If the original data on your hard disk is accidentally erased or overwritten, or becomes inaccessible because of a hard disk malfunction, you can easily restore the data from the archived copy. Additionally, the backup utility helps you take a copy of your computer’s System State, which includes the system files and the registry while you can schedule regular backups. The backup program creates a volume shadow copy of your data, that is, creates a temporary copy of the data, including open files that are being used by the system.

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The system configuration information is stored centrally in a hierarchical database called the registry. You can use the Registry Editor to add and edit registry keys and values, restore the registry from a backup or to default values, and to import or export keys for reference or backup.

A word of caution – incorrectly editing the registry may severely damage your system. Before making changes to the registry, you should save a copy in a safe place such as, to an external drive or USB device.

The backup is done using the export function within the Registry editor. Export the registry file as follows:

1. Open the Registry editor by typing regedit in the Search text box from the Start menu
2. On the file menu, click Export
   
3. In the File Name, enter a name for the backup registry file and destination location, choose a removeable media if available
4. In Save as type, select the file type Registration files (*.reg)
5. In Export Range, check the option All to save the entire registry
6. Click Save

Importing the registry file

1. Open Registry Editor by typing regedit in the Search text box from the Start menu
2. On the File menu, click Import
3. Find the file you want to import, click the file to select it, and then click Open

Note: In Windows Explorer, double-clicking a file with the .reg extension imports the file into the computer’s registry.
Last warning: A restored file overwrites an existing one and becomes the active registry of your configuration and hence, any modifications done after the backed up registry are lost!

Last 3 posts by George

• Backup considerations for Microsoft SharePoint - July 26th, 2010
• What is Cloud Computing? - July 19th, 2010
• Is Cloud computing getting safer? - July 13th, 2010

Following my two part series on how to backup and restore (as well as transfer Microsoft Outlook from one computer to another), I received a number of emails asking as well as highlighting other areas of Outlook customisation which can be backed up.

Custom Dictionaries

Custom Dictionaries allow you to store words that are not in the standard dictionary but which are valid. Names, surnames, towns as well as technical terms are common examples of correctly spelled nonexistent dictionary phrases. You would add these words to a custom dictionary so as to prevent the spell checker from prompting you whenever these words are used in an email.

With custom dictionaries it makes more sense to move the file to the folder that holds the pst files. See the article titled “How to backup your Microsoft Office 2007 Outlook in its entirety (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7)” for more information. For Windows 7, the suggested folder was %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Outlook while under Windows XP it was %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\Outlook. This ensures that all terms added to the dictionary are backed up whenever you backup this folder.

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Windows provides the following backup tools:

• File backup: Windows Backup allows you to make copies of data files. You can let Windows choose what to back up or you can select the individual folders, libraries, and drives that you want to back up. By default, your backups are created on a regular schedule. You can change the schedule and you can manually create a backup at any time. Once you set up Windows Backup, Windows keeps track of the files and folders that are new or modified and adds them to your backup. To set up file backup, see the following backup steps

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In my entry titled “How to backup your Microsoft Office 2007 Outlook in its entirety (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7)” I described how to backup the Microsoft Outlook 2007 data file together with that part of the Windows registry that stores within it the email accounts from where Outlook retrieves emails or via which emails are sent out. Today I discuss how to use that backed up information to either recover a failed computer or to transfer the settings from one computer to another. The former may happen if the hard disk fails or as a result of a malware attack while the latter would apply if you are upgrading your computer or operating system.

On your freshly formatted computer you need to install Microsoft Outlook. Accept all the defaults. After the installer completes, run Microsoft Outlook for the first time. You will be asked a number of questions. Enter anything that will allow you to proceed to the end of this process. Do not enter valid email account details because Outlook will attempt to download mail after you complete the process and since this is not the database you will be using, you do not want any messages to end up here (this can be fixed but why create a problem that will need fixing).

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Many people use Microsoft Outlook to download mail from their POP3 or IMAP server. While some may only link their Outlook to one particular email, many today have multiple email accounts all pouring into the same data file. Backing up Microsoft Outlook consists essentially of backing up two different components; the pst file that stores messages (or in the case of IMAP a cached version of the server) together with the registry entry that stores all the different email accounts that are being processed by Outlook.

Backing up the data file

The folk who decided on the default location of the Outlook data file chose a location that is difficult to figure out.  Also when installing Outlook (or when running it for the first time) there is no way to specify a different folder.

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