Mochabomb

10 years ago, if a hard disk failed, I mostly lost some word documents and a couple excel files. Now I save movies, photos, financial data, and more so as time goes on. Hard drives have an average service life of 3 years, see an article at Storage Review here about this - they are products that are designed for short term use - the vendors could spend more and make them last, but would we spend the extra money on it?

Its not if they fail, but when - how much loss are you willing to live with? Storage Review has a great in-depth article about drive reliability, leaving it on or off? and selecting a drive here

Knowning that adrive will one day fail - lets look at a couple back-up scenarios.

The easiest way to back-up computer systems is to use acronis true image 8.0 - well tested, stable and about $36 a copy at newegg.com

Disk Imaging
Acronis:
1. Attach an external drive via USB
2. With windows running, install Acronis
3. Follow the wizard to create a complete back-up of your system , save to external drive - takes about 30 minutes - as simple as push a few buttons and walk away.

Notes:
External disk - put a 250+GB disk in an external enclosure (about $150 total at outpost.com). My T23 Thinkpad has built in USB 1.1 ports - too slow, so I connect the drive to a USB 2.0 card, about $25 in most stores.

Ever have a problem? you can restore from the image and be back up and running in minutes. See it here:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

Acronis makes an image (snapshot) of the hard disk of the disk - and only of files that are seen by the OS (not the deleted or lost data files that a clone would copy; see below). A disk image is a complete copy of the windows installation on the disk. It can be saved as a file, then burned to DVD, etc.

2. Another approach is save copies of everything crucial to one shared drive on a local network and back that up. This way one drive has copies of everything - disk images and crucial data - true overkill. With a 400GB drive, you could save all your home computers on that one 400Gb drive, then copy those to another external 400GB drive. I have a friend that saves his tax business data to a drive that stays in a safe deposit box in case of disaster.

We live off our PC’s more than before, so good and up to date back-ups are crucial.

Disk Cloning
Disk cloning is different than disk imaging - it’s a bit by bit replica of the original drive. Since cloning copies bit by bit, its not OS specific - just copying the bits on the platters. This is great for data recovery efforts where data was lost by re-format or a re-install of the OS. One can recover data working with the clone of the drive. This ensures any work done does not affect the original disk.

Its how I backup my home desktop, I use G4U disk cloning - get it here.

1. shut down
2. remove side cover and install the extra drive
3. boot up with a CD
4. type a command
5. 1 hour later, remove the drive & CD
6. boot up
7. put the disk clone somewhere safe

I once deleted a wrong file and the computer would not boot - just put in the clone and booted up - and since I made the clone a few hours before, I left it in and ran from that.