Keep your Data safe in Windows 7

How to keep your data safe using in built features from Windows 7?
Another tip from Windows 7 secrets book.
With Windows 7 you can use Windows Backup to copy your important files and folders to a safe
location or create a system image that can be used later to restore a broken PC. There’s
even a cool new feature which made its way first in Windows Server that helps you recover old
versions of data files if you save the wrong version. Windows 7 has everything you need
to make sure your data is safe. Now maybe you’ll not need to turn to a third-party backup and
restore utility.

Different Backups, Different Goals
Now that we started to use digital storage for your most valuable data, it’s time you should start
thinking about creating backups, copies of your original data that are ideally kept else-
where for safekeeping. Most of the people don’t even bother to back up data until the worse
happens: a hard drive(Crashes) breaks down, literally damaging all the data with it, or fire or theft
occurs. Whatever may be the situation, you should be prepared for the worst before it happens.
This has become more important because many people now manage both their professional
and private lives on their PCs.Our personal data, files photos , well the list goes on. Those are 
memories, for crying out loud. Given the almost complete lack of decent backup solutions in Windows XP and previous Windows versions, you may be surprised to discover that Windows 7 (like Windows Vista
before it) offers an almost mind-boggling utilities of backup and restore solutions, each
aimed at a different need of the user. Best of all, Windows 7 also includes friendly front ends to all
these capabilities, so that even the most of newbies can get up to speed quickly.
consider the various types of data safety facilities that Windows 7 supports.

Data Backup
If you think of your Documents library as the center of your data universe, and keep an
elaborate series of folders and files there and in other libraries, then you’ll understand the
necessity of backing up these crucial files on a regular basis. To this end, Windows 7 sup-
ports both automatic and manual data backup options, enabling you to choose which files
to back up and when. You can then restore your backups at any time to recover previous
versions of documents, or to replace a file you may have accidentally deleted.

System Image
There’s nothing worse than discovering that you need to reinstall Windows for some
reason. Not only do you have to take the time and make the effort to reinstall the operat-
ing system again, you also have to ensure that you have drivers for all your hardware,
find and reinstall all the applications you use regularly, reload all your personal data,
and reconfigure all of the system’s options so that it’s exactly the way you used to have it.
Rather than go through this mess, you can use a Windows 7 feature called System
Image Backup to create what is called a system image or snapshot. This image—which is
essentially a huge backup file—contains the entire contents of your PC as it existed the
day you created the image. If you need to recover your entire PC, you can simply restore
the system image and get right back to work.

File Recovery
Windows 7 offers the following two excellent ways to recover lost files:
Previous Versions:   If you want to recover an older version of a document, perhaps
because you made an editing error and then saved it, you can use this feature to
access previous versions of the file.

System Restore:  If you make a change to your system that renders the PC unstable,
such as instal l ing a bad driver, you can use this feature to return to a previous state
in time, or restore point. When you reboot, none of your data has been changed,
but the rest of your system configuration returns to that of the day and time the
restore point was first made.
Add all that up, and what you have is the makings of a full-featured data recovery software
suite. Amazingly, Microsoft provides all of that functionality in Windows 7, for free