Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Those of you with a liberal arts education probably remember that it was Plutarch who warned Julius Caesar, "Beware the ides of March." Now that the Ides are upon us, it occurred to me to discuss what the Microsoft Office user needs to do to prepare for an eventual disaster: a hard drive crash, loss of data, and so on.

Okay, I hear you scoffing, here comes another warning about performing a backup. Well, yes and no. But I do know that many small business users rely on backup software or don't even think about backups.

I did cover some of the aspects of backup in a section on MS Word when I became the Office Guide. That article covered the Save My Settings Wizard and few other goodies like a Desktop file and folder strategy, but times have gotten more complex, as you'll soon see.

But that's not really the point. I still have a program called STOMP Backup My PC, and despite its being about the best I've found, I rarely use it. Here's why.

Backing Up is Hard to Do

If you get a virus or some kind of horrendous error and Windows doesn't load, what can you do? You can keep your fingers crossed while you perform some kind of funky rescue operation and hope that Windows comes back. If it does, you sigh a deep sigh of relief and hopefully... you back up your data!

Because if it doesn't, here's the ugly truth: no backup will bring back Windows the same way it was. Nothing. Nada. Never happen.

Okay, there are Ghost programs that take a snapshot of your PC and restore it exactly the way it was, but you can't increment an image file, and they also tend to degenerate.

But actually restoring a Windows installation? Based on my experience, it's never worth the effort. For one thing, whatever crashed it is still there. So what happens?

You need to reinstall Windows. That's the deal. You probably need to go through the pain, and also update all of your patches and service packs before venturing back online.

And what about your programs? Fohgettaboutit, as Tony Soprano would say. Everyone knows that your software needs to be "registered" in the Windows registry and properly reinstalled.

So you're basically at the point of reinstalling Windows and reinstalling your programs. (Do you know where your discs are?).

So that's the bad news. What's the good news?

DVD Burners are Cheap

DVD discs are 5 cents apiece. That's right. You can now store 4.7 gigabytes of data on media that you can buy really inexpensively. I saw a 50-pack of DVD-R 4X at Fry's Electronics for $12.50, with a $10 rebate – 5 cents a disc! And the drives are not expensive either.

The reason is that new formats are coming out – dual layer and and HD-DVD and such, but who cares. You can back up a ton of stuff for virtually pennies.

You can also put in a second hard drive for under hundred bucks. This makes backing up a breeze. And, if you copy your installation CDs to the hard drive, you can reinstall in a flash too. (Don't forget about downloaded driver files). Of course, this doesn't cover a fire or flood, which wipes out everything, so I use both a backup hard drive and a set of DVDs.

Now the question becomes: what do you back up?

Well first of all, your data. Duh. But where is it? Most Office users save their primary files (Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, etc.) to their My Documents folder. Do you know where that is on your hard drive?

It's physically located at C:\Documents and Settings<Your User Name>My Documents. But you can drag its files to a DVD compilation by opening your My Documents folder.

And what about the Desktop? If you're like me you save lots of files directly to the desktop, or create desktop folders for projects you're currently working on. I use this method with a small 512MB pocket USB drive to do a daily backup of just the files I'm currently working on.

Okay, cool. So if you drag your My Documents and Desktop files to a DVD backup, you're covered for work product, right?

Not so fast. What about e-mail? What about Contacts, or your Calendar. Hello! Do you know where your Outlook file is?

Your Outlook file is a gargantuan *.PST file that is located in C:\Documents and Settings<Your User Name>Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.

Quite a mouthful, and you need to drill down there to drag it to your backup media.

If you need smaller files to backup Outlook components or want to get further into backing up Outlook, check out an earlier article on this topic.

Okay, now what about Templates?

Remember all of those cool macros and autotext entries you saved in the Normal.dot template of Word, or the timesavers you created in Excel templates? Where the heck are those?

Here we go again. Your templates saved by default into your Templates folder are in:

C:\Documents and Settings<Your User Name>Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

So drill on down again, and save all of your templates.

By the way, I wouldn't count on Outlook backing up those cool signatures and stationery we created recently. These are not in the Outlook folder, but in another folder near Templates, directly in:

C:\Documents and Settings<Your User Name>Application Data\Microsoft

Now some of you smart folks are saying, okay, but what about the Microsoft Office Save My Settings Wizard? (found under Microsoft Office Tools).

I've tried this method, and it's not bad. But I don't really trust it. It didn't save my macros (templates), and I don't think it will save my signature files correctly with the linked images I use when I save my signatures as an HTM page. In any case, I like to actually safeguard my underlying files. And I have 4.7 gigabytes.

Something still manages to slip through the cracks. For example, we covered OneNote. Anyone know where the OneNote files are saved? They're in My Documents under My Notebook. If you open the folder, they're actually organized by your OneNote sections.

Figure 538

And speaking of HTM pages, what about your FrontPage webs? Do you know the physical location of these Web sites in your folders? FrontPage very quickly lets you decide where the webs are saved – and they are generally saved as MyWeb(1, 2, etc.) in My Documents, unless you were careful enough to rename them.

So okay, that's a tour of Office files. I can hear you saying, but that's a lot of work, locating all of these files and dragging them into my DVD burning program.

Here I am adding my Templates folder to Nero Express – and I already have over 3 gigabytes of files from my Desktop folders alone.

Figure 539

But I ask you this – what's more work – doing the backup and restore, or reconstructing all of your Office files, including e-mail, contacts, calendar, templates, and OneNote files from scratch?

Now that's a frightening thought. Welcome to the Ides of March.

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