Finishing up your backup to prevent your data loss nightmare
Ok, so now you have your external USB drive all reformatted and ready to go. Now all you have to do is copy your hard drive onto the new drive, right? NO, stop. Copying is great but want you want here is a backup. When you’re talking about an entire drive, copying will take a long time and you’ll probably run into a bunch of messages you’ll need to approve. Now, to each his own, but I don’t relish sitting in front of a omputer click “Yes” or “No” and watching the files copy.
What you want is a backup utility. There are quite a few to choose from but my backup utility of choice is Syncback. They have a few different versions so pick the right one for you. Based on just needing a basic backup, the freeware version works nicely for me. The freeware version is at the bottom of the download page. Download and install.
After you’ve installed Syncback go ahead and start up.
- Start by going under profiles and selecting new.
- Syncback will ask you what type of profile you want to make. Backup, Synchronisation or Group. The definitions are pretty self-explanatory. Here you want to choose backup.
- Then it will ask you to name the profile. Give it a name so you’ll understand what you’re backing up.
- After that you’ll need to select a source and destination. The source is what you want to copy and the destination is your new drive. You can do some customization here if you want but the standard options will give you a fine backup.
- After you have your profile how you want it, click ok.
- At this point you can click on your profile and either run it or do a simulated run the first time. Usually I’ll save this til the end of a day, click run and let it run overnite.
- If you’re so inclined you can also schedule your backups.
There you have it. No one wants to come across a dead hard drive but if it does happen, at least now you’ll have a copy of your data.
