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Backing Up Your Hard Drive

 

Fact... Computers crash causing loss of data and hard drives fail. When you have a new computer, it's not a big deal if it crashes. You can simply reload the original software and you're back up and running. If you've had your computer for a couple of months and you've used computers for years, it's likely that you have loaded all sorts of personal files and your favorite software. You've loaded all of the software for all of your peripherals and you generally have your computer just as you want it. If you load all of this stuff over a period of months, it may not seem like much but if you have to restore a computer to where it was before a bad crash or drive failure, the task will seem enormous (especially if it has to be done in a matter of days). If you want to protect yourself, you need to burn an 'image' of your hard drive. The image will be an exact copy of your drive. It's not only the OS but it's also all of the software and files that you've loaded onto the drive.

There are a couple of popular programs that can perform this task. First is Norton's Ghost. The second is True Image from Acronis. I prefer True Image by a large margin but many people swear by Ghost. Both work with most systems. Be aware that the amount that you backup will have to be written somewhere. if you have a drive partitioned, it's OK to write the image to the other partition (you can't write to the partition that you're backing up). The problem with writing to the same drive is that you don't have a copy if the drive fails. If you have a second drive (even an old slow drive), you can write to the second drive and have a bit better security against a failed drive. with both software packages, you also have options on the size of the files you want to write. If the backup file is going to be 3GB, I would recommend that you write it to multiple files that were 700MB in size. That way you could burn the individual backup files to individual CDs. If you're going to burn it to DVD, the file size limit is about 4.2GB (it's less than the rated 4.7GB).

In the following screen cap, you can see that there are 6 files with the extension of .TIB. These are the True Image backup files for the 'C' partition of this drive. These were set to a size that would fit on a CD. They register as more than 700MB but they will fit on the CD fine (remember the difference in binary and decimal values).

Below is the first window you see when you start True Image. You want to create an image. Double-clicking on 'create image' will get us to the next step.

This is self explanatory.

Here, it wants to know what we want backed up. All we want to backup is the C partition. As you can see, that's the only thing checked.

Below, we have to select the drive in which we want to store the image. I chose drive E and entered the name 'backupfortutorial' and clicked NEXT.

The following box allows us to make a new image or to append a previous. It seems to take just as long to append an image so I always create a new image.

Here we have a choice as to the size of the output files. I typically choose the 700MB size so I can burn them to CD.

Below, we choose the compression level, Normal works fine. Maximum compression will work more slowly but will take less storage space.

If desired, you can enter a password to protect the archive. I never do but the choice is up to you.

Here we can enter comments. If you are producing backup files from many different computers, it's a good idea to enter any information you may need about the computer, the owner of the computer, the date and any other information that you think may be useful in the future. Remember that it may be a long time before you'll need the files. It's unlikely that you'll remember everything when the time comes to use the backup files.

This is self-explanatory. Click 'proceed' to start the backup process.

This is the backup in progress.

This shows that the backup process has completed. Click OK to close the dialog box and close the main window of True Image to exit the program. It don't get much easier than that.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

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Perry Babin 2005
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