Backup Hard Drives

All computers store information on hard drives and it's important that if you have items like photos, documents, accounting information, that you don't want to lose you better be backing these files up on a regular basis. Here's a good way to backup hard drives, regardless of the type of information and create a automated backup strategy.

The best defense is an offense when it comes to backing up hard drives. The number one reason people don’t back up their data is they don’t want to take the time. At the end of the day, most people are more than ready to call it a day (whether it’s at home or working in the corporate world). Who wants to hang around and back up hard drives?

Of course when the computer crashes or there’s a hard drive that fails, and they don’t have a recent back up (or any back up), there goes the data. So the best way to make sure a daily back up is made is to automate it and not have to manually do the chore. There are three quick steps to make this daily back up as painless as possible.

The only thing we really care about is user created data files so the first step is to organize your data files under one directory. You can break them out in any way that is convenient under that single directory, like all documents under /docs or under client names, or even using a combination. This gives you one directory to back up and only do incremental (just files that changed) after an initial total back up of all files. This will speed up the daily back up to just minutes every day depending on what you create or change on any given day.

The latest Windows 7 operating system has a great back up feature built in that allows scheduled back ups. It can back up an image (your entire hard drive) or selected important data. The image back up is usually quite large so it's slow and requires an external hard drive large enough to hold the image. You can also use both in tandem, making a data back up once a week and then doing an entire image once a month.

You’ll need to get a USB hard drive that can hold the amount of data you need to backup hard drives that you use and the set up the software to do daily back ups at the end of the day. The software will even track any issues so you can review the log files the next day to double check your files did in fact back up to your USB hard drive.

I know that many of the popular USB drives come with back up software but I’ve been using Karen’s Replicator for over 7 years and never had a problem. Many of the free programs that come with your USB drive are nowhere near as reliable. Plus you can do many more things with Karen’s software that you will definitely find handy.

Additional tips:

When you go to set up Karen’s software make sure you know the assigned drive letter for your USB Hard Drive. It should grab the first available (usually E: or above) and as long as you keep the same number of attached devices it will always connect at the same drive letter designation.

Allow a little time for the initial back up of your data, especially if you have a lot of music and graphic files. Even on a USB 2 connection (considerable faster than USB 1) it can take quite a bit of time. If you have a Firewire connection and adapter for your USB drive, by all means use it since it will be the fastest method of doing the initial copy.

Make sure you buy a big enough USB drive for the future amount of space you might need, not just current amount. USB drives are coming down in price and as of this writing you can get a 1 Terabyte drive for around $100. So now you have no excuse not to backup hard drives on any computer you use on a daily basis.

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