How to backup your computer the right way

Peter says you tell us to backup our computers but you don’t tell us how
You are constantly telling us to back up our computer regularly . But how do you do that, do I put each individual File and Folder one at a time onto a memory stick or disk. Is there a way to download the whole lot in one go onto a disk. Is it a special type of disk. So many questions, as you say, there is no such thing as a stupid question?

Our answer
Your question is a very good question..

There are two types basic types of backups file-by-file (or folder-by-folder) and image-based backup (or hard drive clones). The former is troublesome. If your hard drive crashes you have to reinstall Windows, set it up, and then spend hours reinstalling your programs (if you’ve remembered to backup the programs installation file or you have the CD). Then if a program requires a registration key, you’ll have to sift through your emails or wherever you saved the email with the registration key, find the key and register the program. If you don’t have a lot of programs or a lot of files and folders, this may take you only a few days. If you have a lot of programs and a lot of files and folder it may take you two weeks or more.

With an image-based backup, you clone your entire hard drive, including the operating system, all programs, all files, all folders, all settings, everything. And if your computer goes belly up or your hard drive fails, you’re only about 45 minutes away from getting your computer back up and running exactly as it was before disaster struck – even if you’ve installed a new hard drive.

Here’s how image-based backup programs work:

The first time you run the program, you’ll be asked to create a bootable CD or USB you can use to boot your system, even if Windows is not on the hard drive. This special CD or USB allows you to format new hard drive (prepare it so you can use your image-based backup), it also allows you to restore your hard drive (or new hard drive) using your image-based backup.

Then you’ll start the backup process (creating an image of your hard drive). The first time you run the image-based backup program, it will take you several hours, since your starting from scratch. After the initial run, however, you can do incremental backups, in other words, only data which have changed are backed up – there’s no sense backing up anything that hasn’t changed again – it’s already backed up.

There’s no doubt that using an image-based backup program is harder than dragging folders from your hard-drive to USB drive, but in the end, you’ll be glad you took the time to learn how to use an image-based backup program. The time you spend learning how to use it will be well worth it if you ever have to use your image-based backup to restore your computer or clone your backup to a new hard drive. You won’t spend days or weeks getting your computer back up and running, you might spend an hour.

There are two image-based backup programs we’ve used. One offers a free version, the other doesn’t. Paragon’s free image-based backup program has saved both of us on at least two occasions when our main hard drives failed. So we know it works. It’s just not really easy to use. But if you follow the instructions, it’s a great program that works very well.

Acronis is also a great program that we’ve used to restore our computers. It’s not free, but it is a bit easier to use than Paragon – in fact it’s a lot easier to use. Both work in basically the same way, both require you to create a bootable CD or USB when you first run the program – and don’t skip this step. Without that bootable CD or USB you won’t be able to access your image backup and/or you may not be able to boot your computer. Important step – so don’t skip it.

You can get more information about Paragon’s free image-based backup program from here: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/

Learn more about Acronis True Image backup program from this location:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/

Oh, one more thing. Before you start making image-based (clone) backups, remember they’re very large. Never store your backup image on the same drive on which Windows is installed. If that drive goes bad, your image-backup will be useless. We strongly suggest you spend about $70 – $90 and buy an external hard drive of at least 500GB. If you have a large hard drive and you have a lot of data and programs, we suggest you get a 1 terabyte or larger external drive. Use the external drive for nothing other than storing your image-based backups.

Remember file-by-file backups are OK if you’re saving photos, music, or movies for safe-keeping. But storing program folders is basically useless – you can put them back on your hard drive, but there’s a greater than 90% chance those programs won’t work – you’ll have to reinstall and re-register them if the program requires a registration key. With image-based backups, EVERYTHING is backed-up. Your hard drive and everything on it is backed up sector by sector, including your operating system.

There’s only one kind of backup that we recommend for everyone and that’s image-based backups. If you still want to back up file-by-file do it for photos, movies, documents, and music files – things you might delete by accident or things you want to have easy access to. But never depend on file-by-file backups when it comes time to restore your computer.

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