Well, a few days ago my 3 week old Hard-drive failed. Failed completely, the PC Bios doesn’t even recognise that it is connected. I have never had a drive fail before so it is a bit of a shock to me. So now I am back on the old HDD with the old install of Windows XP (glad I didn’t reformat it!). Vista has gone bye-bye for a little while until the HDD is replaced.
What do I want to do, I want to buy another 250GB drive and have it as a back-up? This is where I need help.
I want to have a 250GB drive working in the PC and a backup 250GB in an enclosure. Then once a week or so have a complete image on the working drive put to the back-up drive. The reason? If the internal drive fails , I can just use take the back-up drive out of the enclosure and put it in the PC and away I go again , with minimal data loss.
So what software do I use? I have never backed up like this, all I have ever done is put music and photos etc. onto DVD for storage. Something easy to use, prefer a one button type thing that makes a complete working image.
Recommendations please.
The social bookmarks work. No badges though, huh?
As far as backups go… I used to use Ghost, but it’s belongs to Symantec now. Also, it has to drop out of Windows in order to work (that is if you’re using Windows). I used Drive Image on my old PC. I think it belongs to Symantec now too. Any good imaging software, as long as both drives are pretty much identical, should do the trick.
Thanks Richard.
What do you mean No Badges?
Like the digg and reddit badges that people can click on to vote for your article without having to go to digg or reddit first.
why not simply use the wondows copy function?
or the backup function ?
I have the same system and use it all the time
Does that give me a complete image – meaning I could just plug the backup hard-drive in and it would boot from that?
I like acronis true image – I am not sure whether you could plug in the backup harddrive and boot from there – it does do full disk images though so may be worth a look. Version 10 just released at $49.99 and works with Windows Blister.
if you are looking for a backup solution for your personal computer, actually windows built-in backup utility is sufficient. it allows customisation such as to select which folders, drives to backup and the destination to backup to. Ontop of that, you can also do schedule backup.
to backup the OS partition, the best practice is to Ghost that partition. Do a clearn insatll of the OS and all the applications you need, defrag the partition then Ghost it to a DVD or another harddisk, this way, you can restore the OS without reinstalling in future.
Thanks Wai.
Ghost is Symantec, isn’t it or does a similar function exist built in to Vista?