Category Archives: Tech Tips

How to Backup the My Documents Folder

Backing up your important documents, files, and folders is something you should be doing quite often. A virus or hardware failure could strike at any time and with little warning. Generally speaking, most Windows users keep many of their important files in the my documents folder. In this post, I will take a look at how you can backup the My Documents folder.

Windows Backup and Restore

Just as big companies make use of service providers for confidential document scanning of their physical files, your digital data can also be backed up. The easiest way to back up the My Documents folder is to use an automated program or service to do so. Windows comes with a utility called backup and restore that can be scheduled to perform backups. If you use this utility, Windows, by default, will backup the My Documents folder. To access this utility, simply click the Start button and in the search box type in “backup and restore”. Now, just click the link for “backup and restore”. This will bring up a dialog box for the utility. At this point, you can simply go through the process. I would highly recommend that you backup your files to an external hard drive, network drive, or flash drive. Backing your files up to the same physical disk is kind of pointless.
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Quick Tip: Create a Batch File to Delete Files or Folders

In a few recent guides on this site, I have looked at how to use a batch file to backup files and how to essentially create a batch wait command. In this guide, I wanted to take a look at how to use a batch file to delete files or folders.

There are a number of reasons why you may want to do this. Maybe you want to automatically clean out a temporary folder. Or, perhaps you want to automatically delete content you get often such as  podcasts or videos. Let’s take a look at how you can create a batch file to delete these files. read more

How To Use Online Backup with Slow Internet

Do you suffer from slow internet? Then you might need to look into How to Get Faster Internet for Free because no one should be buffering in this day and age! But how are you meant to back up your files if your internet is really slow?

I’m discussing this today because I’ve heard many people say that they would like to use online backup in order to protect their valuable personal files, but believe that their slow bandwidth and large data volumes would make online backup impractical for their needs. read more

Batch Wait Command

Recently, I published a blog post that detailed how to create a batch file to backup your files. Another thing I have needed to use in batch files is a wait command or something to make the batch file temporarily stop. In the post, I want to take a look at four good ways to essentially make your batch file wait.

Batch Timeout Command

The first way that I have seen this done is to use the timeout command. If you have a really old version of Windows, like XP or older, this might not work. However, this generally will do what you need. To make the your batch file wait for 5 seconds, you could use: read more

Creating a Backup Batch File

Backing up your computer data should be done often by everyone with a computer. A hard drive can go out at any time without much warning. It can be tough to remember to constantly backup your files though. Luckily, with the newer versions of Windows, you can setup a backup schedule. However, at times, the Windows backup utility can feel limiting. Due to this or other reasons, you may not want to use the Windows backup scheduler. In these cases, you can create a computer backup batch file.

Quick Tip: Try Mozy Online Automatic Backup: 2GB Free read more