Dear All I have program used as cashbook in my company, installed in C drive, which has my record of monthly and annual expenses, now if I want to format c drive and install fresh copy of winxp, how can I make back up of my cashbook program to aviod losing of data, because i know if i format c drive the program will be removed and then if I reinstall the program the previous data would not be there. Can any body guid me! Abdul Naseer Ansari Afghanistan

Backup just the data and forget about the program itself. You cannot restore it after format programs based on XP usually make use of various windows directories plus the registry itself. You should reinstall the program then restore the backup data to the program's user data folder. i_Xp/VistaUser

Go to File Save as, then save this to an external destination ? After you reload windows & reload the application, copy this file to C:\program files\ ??? In future make regular backups in case you have to reload windows. Perhaps someone else has a better suggestion. Before posting try google. Backup. Use anti virus software.

The program should have a way to perform regular backups built right into the program. If you are like most of us you only learned how to perform the necessry tasks with the program and stopped learning there. I suggest you look for a backup tool in the program. At any rate you should be backing up on a frequent schedule. Frequently enough so you don't lose a single transaction. You will be glad you did when you computer crashes.

Another (often overlooked) aspect of backing up, is to have more than one backup. In other words, do not overlay the last backup with the new one. Keep as many backups as you feel safe with, and then when you take a new backup, delete the oldest one.

Thanks for your replies This program does not have any option of backup and when something is entered to it, it is automatically saved, so you cannot save as it externally, everything is within the program it is not like word or excel where you can save your files anywhere, here everthing is saved within installed program, maybe if there is any way of backing up the program for instance making image of it. Abdul Naseer Ansari Afghanistan

You can still backup the one or more folders that actually contain the data. The trick is to figure out which folders they are. I have a contact manager like that but I know which folder the actual data is stored in. All you need to do then is replace the newly installed folder with the backup version and you are in business. You look for file size differences to determine which folders contain the data.