Back Up – Back Up – Back Up

I received a call from a really good friend the other day. His laptop was messed up. It would boot to the Windows screen and then reboot and continued to cycle in this manner. He could not access Windows in any shape or form. He tried the F8 key at startup to try and log on in safe mode or to use the last good startup configuration or to use a restore point to get going. Nothing worked! He had data on the hard drive that he did not want to lose. He got lucky by calling me but most people don’t have his luck or they don’t have a friend that is a computer geek. Mostly though it is luck when something like this happens. If the hard drive goes bad, it is difficult to retrieve anything.

I have a disk with a lot of utilities on it and I tried to correct the problem or at least find out what it was. I eventually found out that the hard drive had bad sectors on it and they were keeping the computer from booting into windows. I tried a number of different programs including Spinrite which is an incredible hard drive diagnostic and repair program. Spinrite crashed as soon as I started it. I ran another program on the hard drive and it showed that it had 13 corrupted sectors.

I took a chance and used a recovery disk from my favorite backup program, Acronis True Image Home. I booted with the disk and tried to backup his data. I was able to do that successfully. I then attempted to back up his entire hard drive and I was successful with that. Finally, I had a 2.5” laptop hard drive that I use for photo trips to keep duplicate copies of my images. I put the hard drive into the laptop and restored the drive from the Acronis full backup that I had made. There were a few corrupt files that I found later so I did a repair of Windows XP. My friend came today and picked up his laptop. He didn’t lose a file.

If you have my luck, you won’t get off so easy. It is incredibly important to back up your computer. It is not really expensive and it can save you a ton of grief. I am going to tell you what I would recommend. My choices are not the only ones but they are so much better than nothing.

Here is what you will need:

1) External Hard Drive
2) Backup Software

The external hard drive is easy. I love to shop at a store called newegg.com. They have a great selection of hardware and software, great prices, and great service. The only downside for me is that I live in New Jersey and they charge sales tax. There are two ways that you can buy an external hard drive. You can purchase the external hard drive already assembled with the case, hard drive and cables. I am looking at newegg’s specials for today and I see a Western Digital My Book Essential 640GB drive for $89.99 USD and free shipping. Another choice would be to buy an internal hard drive and an external enclosure and assemble it yourself. It is very easy to do this and it could save you some money. A Western Digital Caviar SE 16 640GB drive costs $74.00 USD with free shipping and a Vantec Nexstar 3 USB 2.0 Enclosure is $29.99 USD plus shipping. In this case, you don’t save any money but you get to pick the drive that you want. Be careful when choosing external enclosures. Make sure that they support the size of the drive that you are buying. For the most part, you shouldn’t have any trouble until you get above 160GB. If you can’t find the info on newegg’s web site, go to the enclosure manufacturer’s web site and check there. The choice that you make of hard drives and/or enclosures are yours. I don’t know what your needs are. You should get a hard drive at least as big as the one in your computer and consider a USB 2.0 drive or an eSata drive (if you have an eSata connection on your computer). If you’re not sure, choose USB 2.0. All newer computers have it and a USB 2.0 system is backward compatible for USB 1.1.

Okay, now that you have the hardware, you need a backup program. Windows has a program built-in but I prefer third party software that offers much more in the way of customization. My favorite program in Acronis True Image Home. The current version – True Image Home 2009 is selling for $49.95 USD. It has a lot of options and it makes backing up simple. I have my computer set up to back up my entire hard drive once a week and to backup “My Documents”, “My Photos”, “My Music”, “My Videos” and my email every day. I have had opportunities to restore individual files and entire hard drives in the past. Acronis True Image Home will even send an email to your email account to tell you if the backup was successful. Once you become comfortable with the software, you can change it so that it only sends you an email when there is a problem with the backup. Knowing that I have a backup gives me great peace of mind.

Backups are cheap insurance against the day when you have a disaster. I did not say IF you have a disaster, I said WHEN you have a disaster. It happens to all of us at one time or another. Be prepared! Don’t lose those special photos, videos or files that mean so much to you.

A last piece of advice about why I like newegg.com. I am a true believer in reading what other people have to say about a product before buying. I often research things to death and it drives my wife mad. I find user information invaluable on newegg. I have also found that newegg.com has a great rating on resellerratings.com. If you are ever unsure about buying from a web site, check them out on resellerratings.com. You will find out how good or bad they are. Newegg.com rates a 9.83 out of 10 with 3797 six-month reviews and 26183 lifetime reviews. That’s good enough for me.

Since I mentioned resellerratings.com, consider checking out online vendors there. You can read what real people like you and I have to say about the vendors. I have been ready to make purchases and checked out the vendors to find them with ratings of 1 or 2. Once I saw that, I didn’t care how good the deal was, I looked for another vendor.

A good backup philosophy should give you peace of mind. Feel comfortable that the next time that disaster strikes, you are ready for it. 

I wanted to add to this post. I just changed the hard drive in my laptop to a larger sized drive. My original thought was to connect my portable hard drive which uses a USB connection  to power the drive to the laptop and use Acronis to clone the old hard drive to the new one. I had some problems with this. I think that it had to do with using a portable hard drive that gets its power from the USB connector on the laptop. I eventually completed the clone. My reason for this addition is that  if you are going to purchase an external backup drive, consider one that has its own power supply. If you don’t need to take the external drive with you when you travel, purchasing one with its own power supply would be a good choice. I take my external drive with me when I go on photo trips. When I download the files to my laptop’s hard drive, I download the same files to my external hard drive so that I always have two copies of each file in case something fails.

© 2009, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.