How To Backup Harddrive

Here is a guide to backing up your Hard Drive: (this guide is only going to cover Windows 2000/XP but if you want more info on Vista, Linux or Mac's then please leave a comment...)

First think about the resources your going to need:

a) Software to use for backing-up with,

b) List of what it is you are wanting to backup and

c) Someplace to backup your data too.

What Software Are You Going To Use?

There is an overwhelming choice of backup software available but what to use...

You can simple use Window Explorer to copy your files to another drive or use your CD Burning software to write data to a CD or DVD but it has it's limitations, you can't copy "open files" that is any file that is already being used like a Word or Excel document, it cannot be automated so that it automatically copies your files somewhere. But it is a simple way to back a quick backup to another hard-disk or to a USB memory device.

Using dedicated Backup software has a number of advantages:

• You can create automatic backup sequences that once set you can forget about
• You can backup "Open Files"

• It can do a "Verify" which is where it checks the data that has been backed up for any corruptions that might have happened during the backup process.

• You can backup to a wider range of devices, CD/DVD, Network Drives, Online (Internet) Storage services, Tape Drives, Internal or External Harddrives etc.

Some software that you can use:

Free Software: Built in Windows Backup utility called NTBackup, for a free application it's not bad, there is a Backup and Restore Wizard and can be set to do scheduled backups. You can backup "Open Files" and backup to Tape Drives or other attached devices.

But you can't backup directly to a CD/DVD Writer, you have to backup to a temporary location and then use your CD/DVD Burning software to create a copy of the backup file.

One main problem I with using NTBACKUP is with doing full System Restores. I have had nothing but headaches with it, you can do it but you need to be a bit of a Tech-Head.

Saying that though; when using it for general data backups I can't complain. It's not flash, it's not got a "cool" user interface but it dose the job.

One extra thing I will say is that I have found that sometimes the backup scheduling can go a little coockoo, not sure why but it’s something to be aware of.

Bought Software: I won’t go into great detail and I don't want to boar you to death (or me for that matter) but getting and using good quality backup software can realy make your life easer.

First off, among other benefits, you tend to get a better User Interfaces and have a wider option of devices to backup to, including Online Storage, USB and Internal Storage and direct CD/DVD writing capabilities. With some of the better products you can backup remote computers too.

I’m not going to give a review of such software as there is so much variation in both what they provide, cost and needs of the user that it's going to take more room than I have here to cover it all.

I will be adding more to this Hub about such software and maybe some video tutorials. If you want them then post a comment and that will get me motivated to create some sooner rather than later. In fact if you have any backup related question then post it.

What Are You Going To Backup and Where To Back It Up To?:

Before you consider where your going to back things up to you must consider what your are going to backup. You should also be thinking about your backup regime (I'll cover the topic of backup ragimes later in this Hub). This is importent as it will dictate to you where best to backup to.

If you have a small to medium amount of data to backup then you can use writable CDs (aprox 700MB) or DVDs (4.7GB single layer).

If you wan to do a complete computer backup then you'll need something with more room to store stuff, like a harddrive (40GB to "To-Big-To-Think-About" size -Terrabytes)

There is an on-going debate of "longgevity", that is, how long you can keep your data before it becomes corrupted. This is something that has been bothering the top techies accross the world from the start of the computer age. Modern media has a defined shelf-life for holding data (more on this later...).

If you want to make a full backup of your computer, then your best bet would be to either backup to an additional internal or external harddrive (cheap) or backup to a tape drive (expensive).

To save you the pain of investigating different Storage Media, I'm going to recomend that you use a USB or FireWire Harddrive.

Why? Well for a number of reasons: Flexible - you can take with you - use on any computer - robust - fast but criticly they are CHEAP!.

I would also recomend you think about using a NAS device (NAS stands for Network Attached Storage) and has now become more affordable. The advantage is that it can be semi-remote from the computer so long as the computer can find it accross the network, it can be used by more than one computer, and if you choose the correct type and have if configured correctly, will offer a level of "fault-tolerance".

The down-side is that they are slow when wanting to backup large quantities of date.

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