Before you think to create a backup, you have to arrange your files in an order. It doesn’t mean that you have to arrange each and every file in a different folder. You only make sure that all the essential data files are stored in one easy to find location.

People who use their computer occasionally (7 hours/week or less) should be backing up their data on at least a weekly basis. If you use your computer more frequently, however (more than 12 hours/week), doing it daily is probably a great idea.

How to Backup:

You can set up automatic backups or manually back up your files at any time whenever you want,for that you have to pass through the following steps:

1. Clicking the start button

2.Clicking the control panel

3.Clicking System and Maintenance, and then clicking Backup and Restore.

Notes:

• Never back up your files to the same hard disk that Windows is installed on.
• Always try to store media which is  used for backups (external hard disks, DVDs, or CDs) in a secure place to prevent unauthorized people from having access to your files.

A dynamic link library (DLL) is a collection of small programs, which can be called upon when needed by the executable program (EXE) that is running.

The Compiled library files are  containing a set of  drivers and/or procedures that are referenced and executed by a program that allows multiple programs to access shared system functions through common libraries and It may be dynamically linked into a program at runtime.

Most of the  DLL files are provided with the Windows operating system, and others are included by Windows programs and they allow various program functions, such as communication with external devices and hard disk input and output and it can be referenced by Mac cross-platform applications.

An example : If the program (exe) needs to get the free space of your hard drive. It can call the DLL file that contains the function with parameters and a call function. The DLL will then tell the executable the free space. This allows the executable to be smaller in size and  haven’t to write the function that has already exists.

COMDLG32.DLL

It controls the dialog boxes.

GDI32.DLL

It contains numerous functions for displaying text, managing fonts and drawing graphics.

KERNEL32.DLL

It contains hundreds of functions for the memory management and various processes.

USER32.DLL

It contains numerous user interface functions. It involved in the creation of program windows and their interactions with each other.

NOTE: The contents of a DLL file may cause errors within the program that references the file when deleting or modifying; for this reason, DLL files generally should not be opened or edited.  See here – “How to Open a dll file ?“

In the field of computer networks, there are lots of advancements that are happening every day. Lots of network protocols have been proposed for various applications. One such protocol is the file transfer protocol.

A protocol is nothing but a set of rules which will define how a file is transferred through the computer networks from one source computer to another destination computer. Today file transfer has been the base for most of the protocols. File transfer protocol commonly known as FTP, is used in web applications to transfer data in the form of files from one machine to another. 

The FTP is an open standard and is independent of the operating system and other internal hardware devices that are been used. There is a FTP protocol suite which has various lower layer protocols that will handle the physical connection mechanism. FTP is an application layer protocol which operates over TCP/IP protocol suite.

FTP works as a client server model. The sending machine will be the server and the receiving machine will act as the client. Every machine in the network will be identified by an IP address. The client machine should know the IP address of the server machine. The client machine will ping the server machine with its IP address and issue a connection request for file transfer. Once the server machine issues a connection, the server can send the file to the client machine. The file requested by the client machine should be available in the server machine. Other wise the FTP will throw an error message stating that the file could not be found.

The file transfer protocol is usually implemented in large servers to support thousands of client machine requests. File servers will have the FTP module installed in them. Files will be order in a hierarchical manner in the file server and it will list in the browser when the user pings the file server with its IP address. Once the user selects the file, the file transfer starts from the server. Usually every application layer protocol will have a protocol through which the application will communicate with the other lower layer protocols. The protocol assigned for the File Transfer protocol is 21.

There are various versions of file transfer protocol. One such protocol is the Secure File transfer protocol commonly known as SFTP. The SFTP has some additional security features along with the basic file transfer operation. Encryption algorithms are used in the Secured File Transfer Protocol to enable secure file transfer over the network. As there are more processing needed for these encryption protocols at the source and destination machines, it is slower than the ordinary File Transfer Protocol. The protocol assigned for the Secure File Transfer protocol is 21.

The basic file transport protocol has evolved over the years. Today it has lots of features like authentication, support for more data formats, etc. Also lots of programming languages has inbuilt support for FTP programming which enables easy implementation of this protocol in applications.

Unlike previous filesystem versions like FAT or FAT32 the NTFS (New Technology File System) is an enhanced file system offering better performances and data protection.

The NTFS filesystem was specially developed by Microsoft for the Windows NT operating system and later it proved to be supported by the newest releases of operating systems like Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and the most recent operating system Windows Vista.

In a nutshell, NTFS is one of the most reliable and secure filesystems developed by Microsoft. The base element of NTFS is the Master File Table (MFT) which is an index of all files keeping track of the contents of the NTFS volume. It is advisable to use at least a 50 MB space for a partition as the New Technology File System allocates 5 MB overhead space.

Some other main features of the NTFS filesystem are the support of long filenames, recoverable file system, protection against power outage or system failure, support for compression of files or folders, provides local security, support for spanning volumes.

There are many versions for the NTFS filesystem like:
•    v1.0
•    v1.1
•    v1.2
•    v3.0
•    v3.1
•    …..

Each new version comes with new improvements with new features from which the latest ones for Windows Vista are the Transactional NTFS and self-healing functionalities.
The new 5.0 NTFS version comes with even more features like Dynamic Disk support and Disk quotas.

For those who are working with large volume files usually video files, the NTFS offers an outstanding performance supporting file sizes up to 4GB and an increased performance of new large volume hard drives.

The FAT32 file allocation table was introduced in 1996 together with the improved Windows 95 OSR2 operating system. The newly developed file system made it possible to create hard disks with larger storing capacities than its predecessor the FAT16 which allowed a maximum of 2GB of data. The FAT32 supports large amounts of data up to 2 terabytes and the space is being used more efficiently with smaller clusters.

The new filesystem made possible to relocate the root directory and the boot record has been expanded for backup purposes of critical data. The root directory can be placed anywhere on the hard drive making it more flexible.

FAT32 was developed to be compatible with the existing file architecture used by Windows’95, with data structures and API interfaces so that most applications, drivers and utilities won’t be affected and should be working properly.

Performance of most applications has also increased thanks to the new file system but there are also a few applications which encountered a slight degradation of their performance.

FAT is the acronym for File Allocation Table which is one of the best known methods to keep track of the contents of a disk used by the Windows operating systems. It was invented in 1977 by Microsoft and initially was the solution to store data on floppy disks.
The FAT filesystem was used by the MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), developed by Microsoft. We can distinguish three types of File Allocation Tables:

FAT12 – it is a 12-bit binary file system and the oldest FAT type
FAT16 – it uses a 16-bit binary file system (there are still PCs running Windows 3.1 or 95 in which the hard drive uses FAT16 filesystem)
FAT32 – an improved file allocation table which uses 28-bit binary system

Also known as ‘filesystems’, the most common definition is the way how computer files and the data they contain is being stored logically so that it makes easier to find them on a storage device. Files on any computer regardless the operating system it uses, are being stored by using a hierarchical structure also known as a tree structure. Files can be manipulated easily i.e. they can be moved from one folder to another and organized as the user wants.  

There are conventions for naming files in which it is specified the maximum number of characters, what type of characters can be used as well as the number of characters used in the file extension or suffix.

Each data storage device has a file system software which organizes sectors (array of fixed-sized units or blocks) into files or/and folders. The file system software always keeps track of which sector belongs to a file.
Filesystems contain directories which associate file names with the files and the filename is connected to the index of a file allocation table which can be FAT, FAT32, NTFS or an inode in Unix type filesystems.

The file system usually stores the file creation date, the time it was last accessed or modified.

Most common types of file systems:

•    disk filesystems to store data on different kind of storage devices (hard drives): FAT, FAT32, NTFS, HFS
•    database filesystems when files are organized by their properties or characteristics:
a good ex: dbfs
•    network filesystems (it provides remote access to files on a server). Examples: NFS, SMB protocols
•    flash filesystems (specially designed to store data on flash memory devices)