Recovering From Disaster
Let’s say you fire up your PC one morn-
ing and the only noise you hear besides
the fans whirring inside is an ominous
clicking sound emanating from your hard
drive. Your heart sinks into your stomach
because you know your hard drive is
toast. No worries, right? You backed up
everything before you went to bed last
night. You’ll just fire up SyncBack and....
Oh, that’s right, SyncBack requires
Windows to run. Now what?
Assuming the rest of your PC isn’t
affected by whatever calamity has
befallen your hard drive, you can replace
the drive. If you’ve created an image
of the old drive using a program like
Norton Ghost , use that software to copy
the image (and the working copy of
Windows) onto the new drive, and then
use SyncBack to restore the most cur-
rent versions of your data files.
If you don’t have a drive image, and
you bought your PC preassembled,
the manufacturer might have included
a bootable recovery disc that can help
restore even a new hard drive to your
machine’s initial configuration. If you built
your own PC and you don’t have a drive
image, you’ll need to reinstall Windows
from scratch. In either case, you’ll need
to reinstall whatever other programs
you’ve acquired in the interim—includ-
ing, of course— SyncBack.Restoring Your Files: Option One
After you’ve launched SyncBack there are
two approaches to restoring your backed-
up data. You could simply open the same
profile you used to create your backup and
click the Restore button, but this is risky
and not always possible, especially if your
hard drive was totally wiped out. A Restore
operation swaps the source and destina-
tion directories: Your backup becomes your
source, and the hard drive you’re restoring
to becomes the destination. If there are ver-
sions of any files on your hard drive that are
newer than those in your backup, it’s easy
to overwrite those newer files by mistake.SyncBack will inform you
when the files you’re
attempting to restore have
the same names but dif-
ferent attributes as files in
your destination directory.The freeware version of SyncBack
doesn’t have a robust restore feature,
but you can tweak its Synchronize fea-
ture to overcome that limitation.We recommend creating a new profile to
use when restoring files, to ensure that
only the latest versions of files are copied
to your destination folder. Click the New
button, choose Backup, and click OK.
Give the new profile a name and click OK.
This time, your Source directory will be
the folder containing your backup, and
your Destination directory will be the folder
you’re restoring to. Choose the same
primary option as your backup file, but
click the Advanced tab. Under the head-
ing “What to do if the same file has been
changed in the source and destination,”
click the button labeled “New file overwrites
older file,” and click OK. Ignore the warning
message and click OK. Click the Run but-
ton and your restore will execute.
Restoring Your Files: Option Two