How to back up your hard drive, create a mirror image, and or hot image. Free backup software is also listed.
Do you ever wonder what would happen if your computer crashed? What sort of data would you lose? Photos, financial information, important contacts, the list goes on, there is a lot of very important information on our computers these days. Most do not even think about it until it happens. Maybe it has already happened, and yet you keep putting off doing a hard drive backup.
Today I am going to give some tips, and a great free backup utility that actually will create an image of your drive, even if it is in use. This will allow you to restore your drive even in the worse case scenario. One of the coolest parts is you can set it up to auto back up in the middle of the night on a weekly, monthly daily whatever you want basis so that your data is always up to date.
I can't tell you how time consuming it is and devastating losing years of data. I know it has happened to me a few times, and each time I said; "I need to back up my data", next week I will. Do not let that happen. Take the time and do it now rather than later.
What will you need you ask? Well you will need hard drive space, as much as your drive space you are backing up takes. So if the main C: drive is 250 gigs but is only using up 30 gigs, you will need 30 gigs of space to back up to. I would suggest giving additional space for the back up area so that as your main drive grows you still have room to back up too.
Do not use your main drive, even if you have enough space, if something happens to the main drive your hosed. If you do not have a secondary hard drive a real easy solution these days is get an external hard drive enclosed in a case that can plug in to your USB port. That way if you are not comfortable with opening your computer case you do not have to worry about that. Just plug it in and you are ready to back up. I will provide a link to some below, I got a 500 gig Buffalo and it is great. I really like it because I can plug it in to whatever computer and then restore my drive onto a new drive.
Step 1: First thing to do is download the backup utility that I recommend and install, it is free and works great Driveimage XML.
Here is the link, just copy the link and past in new browser window and download.
http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
Image and Backup logical Drives and Partitions
DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.
The program allows you to:
* Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
* Browse these images, view and extract files
* Restore these images to the same or a different drive
* Copy directly from drive to drive
* Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler
Step 2: If you already have a 2nd hard drive with enough space to backup your main drive you are ready to start your backup, just follow the Driveimage XML simple directions. If you do not have a 2nd hard drive, or it does not have enough space, continue to step 3.
Step 3: What I recommend for a 2nd hard drive is a External USB drive, it is really user friendly and you do not have to open your case, an added advantage is you can also connect it to another computer if needed. There are many now for just over a 100 dollars and you can get a Terabyte of space, HUGE!
You can purchase the Buffalo hard drive from many computer stores, I recommend www.frys.com, or www.newegg.com
You can also search one of my favorite sites for lowest price searching, just use "usb external HD" or "external usb HD" 500 GB or more.
www.dealnews.com
Once you have both the software and hard drive space to back up you are ready to feel ease of mind. The software is really easy to install, and use. There are instructions included with the software on how to set up the auto back up scheduling.
