How to back up data
Why backing up data is important.
Before you think BORING and navigate away to another page just read the next few sentences, I promise you will be glad you did.
Most likely you do some kind of back up already and you feel safe that your protected, I wouldn’t mind betting your not. If your back up plan is not 100% it will fail, if you require the program that created your back-ups to be installed to carry out the recovery process your well on your way to a disaster, if this process also requires some kind of special boot disk, you’re really playing with fire. I have developed my own simple system for a 100% fail safe system, follow this and you are protected 100%.
If possible purchase a second hard drive and clone it, once cloned remove the disk from the computer. This forms a solid starting point and one which can be used in conjunction with your daily back-ups. This maybe beyond the basic users skills, if so you need to perform a full back up to a smaller external drive, Norton Ghost can perform a clone, and is ideal for this function. Once completed remove you drive and store this safely. I never ever overwrite this, if I add a lot of applications I may repeat this, but I always use a new external drive, I never overwrite the original.
Install a product like Genie Back Up and create a back-up schedule, turn off all compression settings and back up to a external drive, by far the best external drive on the market is the Drobo, it’s expensive, but boy is it good. I personally don’t select incremental back-ups, I use the mirrored option, this saves space and makes restoring data easy.
Downloading programs.
When I download a new application I store the downloaded application on a external drive, I also email myself the serial code and place a text file with the serial with the application. If I buy a program on CD or DVD this too gets copied to my drive along with the required information to activate the product.
Judgement day….it will come
I turn on my machine and the hard drive is dead or something goes wrong with the data. I have options, first I go to plan A and try to install the back up, if this fails and often it does, it’s nothing more than an inconvenience. I take out my original back up, install the hard drive and then copy all the data back. If an external drive was used and you can’t boot from this drive you will have to do a clean install of Windows, then install Ghost and clone the external drive to the main drive, your working data can then be recovered from the Drobo drive.
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