Backing up a computer sounds like a job for the geek squad or maybe the NASA team, but your average superhero can handle the job.

Computers store information on hard drives and best-case scenario, the hard drive never fails, nothing is deleted accidently or otherwise, no viruses or spyware attack, and the computer isn’t stolen or lost. Yep, best-case

We’ll need to know how big the hard drive is in order to copy it; right click your start menu and choose explore, click on my computer, find your c: drive, right click c: and choose properties it should give you a pie of used space and free space as well as a capacity, maybe 40 GB or some number. Once you know the size of the hard drive, you can search for an external hard drive to back up the drive.

Amazon is a good source for hard drives, you can buy a hard drive anywhere you want to, just make sure that the capacity (Gigabytes, GB) are as big as your hard drive.

Internal hard drives go inside your computer and that’s a whole nuther article, but external hard drives are usually connected by USB and most computers have a USB connection.

Now we have our computer and a hard drive that’s just as big capacity wise, we need to copy your computer’s hard drive to the new hard drive.

Norton Ghost by Symantec is what I’ve used for years, version 14.0 is selling for $69.99 for the download or CD or $79.94 for both. I just order the download and you can make the CD if you have a CD writer, the good news on getting the download is that you can re-download it as often as you like, just save your link that they’ll send you when you sign up. You will need the CD if your computer completely dies so if you can’t create a CD definitely order one in addition to your download.

After installing Norton Ghost 14.0, go to your Start menu, programs, Norton Ghost, Norton Ghost, the program will launch. You’ll see the splash page giving you the option to ‘run or manage backups’ or ‘recover my computer’ or ‘recover my files’. The menus are user friendly and Norton has good customer service.

Choose ‘run or manage backups’ a popup menu will appear where you will ‘define new’, make sure your new hard drive is connected and select your c: drive and your new hard drive to copy to.

If you leave your external hard drive plugged in you can set Norton to back up periodically, or you could keep an extra external hard drive off site in case of a catastrophe.

Norton allows you to retrieve certain files or the entire drive. I have restored the entire hard drive more than once and certain files several times, the process is painless.

After losing my data and paying a few hundred dollars along with waiting several days for a specialty computer store that was not able to restore everything I researched my options to back up hard drives and this was the best route I found. If you have valuable music or data on your computer, backing it up can create peace of mind.