What invaluable data is on your
hard drive? Wedding photos?
Financial records? Your saved
games from Oblivion? Here’s how
to preserve and recover those
files in the wake of a disaster.
B
acking up the ol’ hard drives belongs on that mental
checklist we all maintain—the one titled “You Know You
Should....” For most of us, data backup falls somewhere
between “Floss Your Teeth” and “Call Your Mother.” These are the
things you know you need to do, but that you just keep putting off
‘til mañana. You also know that it’s inevitable that your procrasti-
nation will eventually bite you in the rump.
Before it gets to that point, download the free edition of
2BrightSparks’ SyncBack software from http://www.2brightsparks.com ,
take 35 minutes, and follow this guide to backing up your hard
drive. Floss your teeth while you’re waiting for the backup to
finish; and when it does, call your mother. She worries.Back Up Your Hard Drive
JUNE 2006 MA XIMUMPC 53
There are two complementary approaches to backing up your
hard drive: One is to create an “image” of the disk, and the other
is to copy only selected files and folders. A disk image is a snap-
shot of an entire hard drive partition, less any empty sectors, and
it includes the operating system, all your programs, and all your
data. This can be useful, but it takes a lot of time and consumes an
enormous amount of storage space. And if you’re moving to a new
PC, the image from your old one is likely to be useless because it
will contain device drivers for hardware that might not exist on your
new machine.
Disk images can be a life saver, though, if you experience a
catastrophic failure and you don’t want to go through the tedium
of reinstalling and reconfiguring your operating system, application
software, and all the device drivers your hardware requires onto a
new hard drive. We recommend creating occasional disk images,
using a program such as Symantec’s Norton Ghost.
But it’s even more important that you copy your data files—
frequently—because you never know when disaster will strike.
That’s the approach we’ll discuss here: using special software
to make backups of all your documents, email, music, spread-
sheets, videos, and so on; plus, any programs you’ve down-
loaded from the Internet.
Our backup method won’t restore any apps you’ve already
installed, so make sure you save your original discs, as well as
any patches and updates that you downloaded. It’s also impor-
tant to store copies of all your licenses and serial numbers,
should it ever be necessary to reinstall any of those programs.
And don’t forget to back up your backup software; you won’t be
able to restore without it!IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME how^2
BY MICHAEL BROWNTIME HOURS:MINUTES
00 : 35
Hard drive
failure is a
matter of
when, not if.
Don’t tempt
fate: Back up
your critical
data.Continued on next page Ë
1 Decide What to Back Up