Q: I recently had to format my hard drive and reinstallWindows 95. Everything ran a lot faster and smoother.Since I went through all this trouble I decided I had betterstart backing up my data. I don't have a tape backup but Ido have six gigabytes of storage space, so I decided to backup my entire system to a folder on my hard drive.
How do I restore my system back to normal if Windows 95crashes? Do I have to reinstall Windows 95, then runbackup and restore or is there a quicker way?
-- PJD
A: Yes, you would have to reinstall Windows 95 and runbackup to restore your archived files. But review yourbackup strategy.
"Essentially, the backup program included with Windows 95is nothing more than a file backup tool. It was not meant torestore an entire system, therefore, it can only run fromwithin Windows 95," said help desk technician JeremySchmuland at GE Capital in Edmonton. "If you wantsomething that efficiently can restore an entire system, tapebackup software is the best way to go. It can run from acommand prompt, meaning that the necessary software canbe put onto a bootable floppy, and your restore can runeven though the hard drive is empty."
Tape drives are the most conventional backup devicearound, but there are a lot of options. Look atwww.storagecafe.com for a list ofhyperlinks to reviews of a variety of backup products.
Christopher Salvador at Vicom Multimedia in Edmonton hasa particular favourite. "There is utility made by Powerquestcalled Drive Image. It allows a user to simply take a pictureor 'image' of the drive and store it."
Storage media it supports includes tape, another drive, adrive partition as well as external drives.
"One can simply boot from a floppy, run the Drive Imageutility and download the 'image' back to a bare drive. It willtotally reconstruct the drive to its original format," he said.
The software is made by the same code jockeys who make
Partition
Magic, which allows you to partition a hard drive.Check
out www.powerquest.com
for more info.
CyberWalker Notes:
If you're looking for some quick hard-drive space on yourWindows 95 machine, because you're running low, try this.Click Start/Find and then "Files or Folders." Then click the"Advanced" tab. You see three pulldown boxes. Leave thebigger one as "All Files and Folders," but change the "Sizeis" box to "At least." Then set the second box to a file size.Try "3000" KB. Click "Find Now" and the system will list allthe files larger than three megabytes in size. It's a great wayto find old install files and datapigs forgotten on your harddrive.
Adding RAM is easy, 
