Backing up your hard drive is the single most important thing you can do to protect your computer. Surprisingly, only about 10 percent of PC users actually have a good backup procedure in place. If your hard drive crashes, your computer system can be re-built, but all of your personal information and other important data will be lost. Virus attacks could also cause you to loose important data if your files get corrupted or deleted. Backing up your computer hard drive on a regular basis is the best way to protect yourself against perils like these.
The first step to developing a dependable backup procedure is to choose the right backup hardware to save your information on. In the past, some people have been burning CDs for their backups. However, burning CDs as a backup method often caused problems if the CDs were not burned properly or got scratched and you could not restore the data off the CDs later. A backup is only as good as your ability to restore the data later. Many people have found out the hard way that their diligent backup discs were worthless when they were unable to restore their data.
Recently, external hard drives have entered the computer marketplace in large numbers. These external hard drives are a great backup media to use. Instead of sitting by your computer continually feeding blank CDs into it, all you need to do is to attach an external hard drive and forget about it. Many of these devices just plug into a USB port so they can be used on other PCs as well.
The best thing about using external hard drives is that they are large enough to backup your main hard drive using this one device. You do not need to run a backup using many CDs which can get expensive after a while. Also, using an external drive is many times faster than burning to CDs. External drives are also much more reliable than CDs, which can easily become scratched or flawed without you knowing it.
The second step in creating a good backup is to use the right backup software package. The two basic types of backup software available are the file backup utilities, and full system image backup utilities. The file backup utilities backed up individual files. This type of backup is slower since it has to access the operating system to find and retrieve each file separately. Most people have hundreds of thousands of files on their PCs so this can be a rather slow process.
Another type of backup software will backup your entire hard drive one partition at a time. These types of backups create backup images of your hard drive that can be saved to an external drive. These images are also compressed to save space allowing you to keep many backup images. If you are using an external drive as a backup device, this type of software is the better way to go.
When using full backup images, you still have to back up your entire hard drive each time, even if only a few files have changed since the last backup. You end up making these backups even though the majority of the data backed up is the same as the last time you did it. A more efficient way is to do an incremental backup. Only the changed sectors on the hard drive are backed up, and any parts that have not changed since the last backup are ignored. This makes for a much quicker backup each time. When choosing your backup software make sure to select one that will do both full system backups and the incremental kind as well.
After getting set up with an external hard drive and the correct software, you still need to actually run your backups to be properly protected. The best strategy is to set up a regular schedule to make your backup images. You should run a full backup image at the beginning of each month, and then do an incremental backup at the end of each week. Remember, you can configure your backup software to do this automatically so after you set it up, you can forget about it.
Save all of your backup images on your external hard drive and keep all of these backup files as long as possible. So basically, just keep them around until you run out of space. For added protection, you can always burn these backup files onto a CD or DVD before deleting them. However, if you have a couple of month’s worth of backup files on your external drive, this should be good enough protection. Finally, to be certain you are making good backups, try restoring some files occasionally to be sure you can actually retrieve data from your backup if you should ever need to.