Backup Your Computers

Your hard drive will fail – April 2008

Lets face it, the hard drive that houses all your word processing documents, spreadsheets, photos, accounting data and other information that has taken years to compile will fail some day.  The question becomes how prepared are you to recover from this inevitable event?  Most people back up their critical files, but what about the programs you rely on to use these files?

If you are not using Drive-Imaging software to backup, a hard drive failure will require not only the reinstallation of the data that a traditional backup can recover, but will also require the reinstallation of the Windows Operating System and all the programs you rely on to use the data from your traditional backup.  The problem with traditional backups is that in the event of a hard drive failure you would have to locate and re-install all your programs to the replacement hard drive.  Many programs also require installation codes.  Even if you are that rare person that knows exactly where all their program disks are located and has all the installation codes filed in a secure place, this process can be extremely time consuming and when you are finished you have lost all the tweaks you have made to your system over the years.  This may include your folders, program settings, application settings, Internet Explorer Favorites and much more.

Drive-Imaging software makes an exact duplicate of your hard disk including Windows and all your programs.  In the event of a hard disk failure you simply pop in the replacement disk, boot the computer from the boot disk that comes with the software and re-install an exact copy of your old hard drive.  This is a process that will take hours instead of the days the traditional method would require.  Best of all is that in a few hours you are back to work with the exact system you had when your hard drive crashed.

There are many Drive-Imaging products on the market that range in price from free to a little less than one hundred dollars per computer.  Norton Ghost 12.0 is a well known product that retails for $69.99.  Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Personal Edition is a solid product that retails for $49.95; however, the interface is a little too complicated.  For a fast reliable backup you cannot beat ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1 by StorageCraft Technology Corporation.  It costs $79 plus $16 per year for updates per computer and will back up to CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray media, external hard disks, network drives and Network Attacked Storage (NAS) units.  It should be noted that that backing up on CDs could be a grueling and time intensive process as you would have to manually feed multiple CDs into your CD drive to back up even the smallest hard drive.  StorageCraft also offers server editions of their products to backup file servers.

ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1 performs incremental backups.  Making a full backup of your computer once a month is highly desirable, but in the interim period this product can make incremental backups while you are still working on your computer.  You can even restore a backup of your computer to a different computer with entirely different hardware.

It is important to have at least one additional backup in place in case your primary backup fails, so Drive-Imaging software may not replace your existing backup software, but will give you the ability to recover from a hard drive crash quickly and probably less expensively than strictly relying on that traditional backup solution.  If you purchase a new computer, it can be used to transfer the contents of the replaced computer to the new computer.  Who knows, it may even help you sleep better at night.