All You Need To Know About Windows PC Backups
Tuesday October 20, 2009 by Nick Niesen.
Hard drives crash, it’s a fact of life; make sure you have a backup.
I’ve lost months of work, major projects, graphics, web pages, (the list goes on) due to the fact that I did not have an active backup running. At the time, secondary hard drives were big, bulky, expensive, and un-reliable. Now, everything has changed. For less then $100, the average user can now have a daily, weekly or monthly backup running giving them piece of mind knowing that if the worst happens, they can recover from the loss.
Backups are the key to being able to recover. Losing work sucks and you don’t know what you’ve lost until you’ve lost it. If you haven’t learned how to use a backup application yet, now is the best time to do so, let’s make it a priority.
Don’t have an external hard-drive?
What you’re looking for is a drive that is the same capacity or larger then your current hard drive. If you don’t know how big your pc’s hard drive is, open up the My-Computer shortcut (either on your desktop or in your start menu) and look for your C: drive. If you don’t already see the “Total Size” of your disk, right click > Properties and check for your hard drives Capacity. This is the size of the drive you are looking for.
Recommendations for Personal Portable Hard Drives: To say the least, I’ve owned a lot of hard drives. A small portable Seagate or Western Digital hard drive would do the trick. The Seagate FreeAgent Go Hard Drive comes with a backup that you might find useful however it is probably not needed if your Windows OS has come pre-loaded with a backup utility. Though, it’d still recommend it.
Backing Up…
Backups of your system are done in increments, you can schedule your computer to run these backups daily, weekly or monthly. It is up to you to decide what will work out best for you and to decide how your system will best handle the backups. If you have a relatively smooth Windows Vista setup, you can set your computer to backup your work daily and shouldn’t have any problems with the operation running in the background while being able to continue your work.
Older (heavy-weight) backup applications can be more intrusive and you will want to set these to run during a time when you are away from your computer. These can (after the first time they have had a chance to work) take just a few minutes to update the files in your current backup. The trick here might be to tell your computer you want it to update an existing backup rather then to create a new backup every time the application is scheduled to run. This will decrease run time, decrease usage of your hard disks and at the same-time increase the life span of your drives.
In Windows Vista Operating Systems, you can find the backup utility in the Control Panel. Older versions of Windows will usually have (though not as light-weight as the vista version) a backup utility made available in the Start Menu > Accessories > System Tools (menu).
Do yourself a favor and take some time to learn one or more of these backup applications. Read through the options made available to your and figure out what will work best for you keeping in mind the balance of system performance, hardware integrity and data integrity.
