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How To Backup Your Hard Drive
Copyright © 2004, Otis F. Cooper
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We all know that we should back up our system as soon
as possible. But if you're like most of us, you will get to
it tomorrow. The problem is that tomorrow rarely ever comes
until you experience a serious computer failure and then
it’s too late.
Taking the time to backup your data or entire hard drive
is not as painstaking as it may seem. And the rewards of
doing so will be great should your system experience a
crash.
WINDOWS AND OTHER BACKUP SOFTWARE
If you have Windows XP you will need to install the new
Windows backup utility from the Windows XP cdrom. Just
place the WinXP cdrom in your cdrom drive and locate
the line D:\VALEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP.
Here you see the first letter as D but if your optical drive
has a different drive letter, exchange the D with your
drive's letter. To install the utility, click on the file
named NTBackup.msi.
The backup utility will be installed to the system tools
group. Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, System
Tools, and Backup. There is a neat wizard that will walk
you through the backup process.
WinXP's backup utility will backup your entire hard
drive and will make a recovery disk to boot.
One neat third party backup software you can try is
NewTech InfoSystems at http://www.ntius.com where
you can download their trial version and put it to use
for 30 days. And if it’s your cup of tea, the full version
will run you about $79.95
INCREMENTAL OR DIFFERENTIAL BACKUPS
You should back up your entire hard drive when you
perform your first backup. After that it is best to perform
an Incremental backup. This type of backup only allows
you to backup files that have changed since your last
performed backup.
Differential Backups copy changed files that have been
added since you last did your entire backup. This type
of backup is more detailed than incremental backups and
is easier to restore.
BACKUP STORAGE DEVICES
You can backup your files on cdroms and have the files
compressed to save both space and backup time. WinXP
will compress folders, subfolders, and files during backup.
You can purchase compression software that will do the
same, saving you cdrom storage space. The compressed
files are automatically uncompressed once they are
restored onto your hard drive.
You can also use a second hard drive as your backup
storage device. We use two backup hard drives to be
certain Ultimate PC Repair is up and running 24/7.
You can either purchase an internal hard drive and install
it to your ide cable, or you may want to purchase an
external hard drive that connects to your Universal Serial
Bus or USB Port.
The advantage of the external drives is that they have very
large amounts of storage space, transfer data fast, and can
be moved from your computer to any other computer.
We use the Western Digital 170 Gigabyte External Hard
Drive and we simply bounce it around to either one of our
four computers with the greatest of ease.
USING ONLINE BACKUP SERVICES
You may also consider online services for backing up
your data. If you lose all your backup data, say due to
a natural disaster such as a flood, your online data is
right there waiting for you.
Another advantage of online backups is that you can
access, upload, or download your data from any location.
It is best to use high speed internet access if you're
considering online data storage.
One such online backup service is Istorage located at
http://www.iomega.com/istorage and charges from
$2.49 a month for 50MBs to $17.95 a month for a big
1,000MBs of storage.
Or you can check out FilesAnywhere located at the url
http://www.filesanywhere.com
Still another online service to try is CapSure located at
http://www.capsure.com
Backup your system now in one way or another if you
have not done so. If you have critical data that you simply
cannot do without, take the time to invest in a backup
device or one of the many online backup services.
Stop and perform those backups as soon as possible.
You will be thankful you did should something go wrong
with your computer. It’s always better to be safe than
sorry.
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Writer's Resource Box:
Otis F. Cooper is the author of the award winning
PC Super Pack, the Computer Training By Video
course. For hundreds more free PC repair tips, sign
up for his bi-monthly newsletter and learn the PC
free at http://www.ultimatepcrepair.com
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The article on this page is Copyright © 2004, Otis F. Cooper
You are not required to show the creative commons license
notice when you reprint this work.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
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