The Folder People Forget to Backup (And Restore)
I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to one of the more important folders on a Windows machine. It’s one of those that you don’t normally see, and if you don’t back it up, you will come to regret it.
The folder is known as the “Application Data” folder, and in Windows 7 is located at:
C:\Users\Justin Gehring\AppData
This folder contains data used in your applications, and many times, it’s extremely important data. (Many times, it’s also not important at all). Some things you can often find in this folder include:
- Your email inbox and folders (Both Thunderbird and Outlook put their local folder storage in here)
- Settings files for your FTP Clients/etc that may store important configuration details you’ve long since forgotten.
- Some software programs store their license keys here.
- If you use Bitcoin, your wallet is often stored in here (which without, you’ll lose all your bitcoins in a crash).
- Log files for programs such as Skype are also stored here.
When backing up your data, I strongly encourage backing up EVERYTHING in the C:\Users Folder… even those pesky temp files. Don’t make the mistake of backing up just your My Documents folder… It’s not enough!
Backblaze of course does this automatically (If you haven’t caught that from my previous posts).