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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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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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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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1. Open the Control Panel Home window from Start / Settings / Control Panel
2. Click Backup and Restore Center
3. Click Back up files button
4. Select location where you want to save your backed up files
5. Select disks that you want to include in the backup
6. Select type of files to include in your backup
7. Create a backup schedule
8. Click the Save settings and start backup button

Alternatively, you can create a complete backup of your entire computer by clicking the Back up computer button and follow the simple wizard :)