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31 Jan 2006 - Submitted by Brian Jilg Backups are one of the most important things you can do but yet are often overlooked until it is too late. And you know what I mean.. your hard drive is making a loud clicking sound when you turn your computer on and it won't boot. You scream so loud your vocal cords are on the verge of going "bink!" like a taut rubber band and there is a dent in the wall where you directed your sonic outburst. Oh it is ugly. Years of data gone in an instant. No chance of recovery unless you want to get a Riggs truck loaded with money and have it delivered to a professional data recovery service. OUCH! So how do you avoid this ugly scenario? It is simple. You backup your data. Regularly. How do you define that? Well that is more than once in the lifetime of the computer, and then on some sort of schedule. (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) That is basic definition of what I would call regularly. Can't I just copy all of the files on my hard drive to a network drive and then copy them back to a new drive? No. That would not work because there are system files that would not copy. No system files no boot. Plus the amount of time you spent copying all that data.. do you really want to sit there that long for it not to work? I did not think so. (but there is a way to do it...) What do I backup? Well that depends on what is important to you. Here is the litmus test I always use: Can you recreate that which you have lost? Can you recreate those pictures? Are you able to re-create those documents and spreadsheets you worked so hard to create? If the answer is no, then you need to backup your data. How do I backup my data? There are many ways to do it these days. I recommend Norton Ghost 10.0. Norton Ghost takes a snapshot of your hard drive and writes it to a file. You can restore your complete system if there is a meltdown! The beauty of it, is that it allows you to write it to a networked drive or an external USB drive. Drives are cheap, so why not have a 250 GB drive to back up your system? You would not want to put a ghost image on the same drive as your OS, what if the drive crashes? Oops.. there goes your backups! Also you can create schedules with it to back it up daily, but just backing up the files that have been created or changed since the full backup, so as to save drive space and speed up backups. You can restore the files individually if you delete them or if your system is hosed up, then you can restore the system in it's entirety to a point in time when it was working. For example, your backups are running Monday to Friday. It is Wednesday morning and your system crashes. No sweat. Install your Norton Ghost Installation CD (YES YOU MUST KEEP IT!) and boot up on it. Then navigate to the Tuesday backup and restore it. Your system will be restored as it was running up until it backed up Tuesday night. So does it work? You bet! I have used it myself and for my clients hundreds of times. Ghost has been around for years and it has been perfected in my humble opinion. So feel safe in backing up your data and go enjoy life. --Reston, Va |
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