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.
How to backup your data and avoid the data loss nightmare
I recently got an email from a friend that had gone through a hard drive crash and lost everything. Luckily, there wasn’t too much there she was upset about but she still wanted to know how to avoid losing information in the future. So I’m going to do a two-part posting on how to back up your data.
You can find a bunch of tutorials to that effect on the web but I’m going to try and make mine very simple.
First you’ll need a hard drive to hold the data. I prefer hard drives to dvd’s or disk media because they can hold more and hard drives are a very good buy right now. Whenever I’m going to buy any technology I usually go to two places. Either Newegg or Tiger Direct. Not only do they have great tech stuff at really good prices, but the commenting system is very valuable. I encourage you to leave a review on a product whenever you can. It makes the community stronger.
For the hard drive, I recommend the Western Digital My Book. That link goes to a 500 gig drive for under $100. You can’t beat that price and that’s a lot of storage. I like the Western Digital stuff the best because they are easy to use. Just plug it into the usb port and it starts right up.
You’ll need to reformat the drive to an NTFS format instead of its default of FAT32. Basically what the difference is that the FAT32 format woun’t let you save a file bigger than 4 gigs to the drive. After the reformat to NTFS though you’ll be golden. Just go to “MY Computer” and right click on the drive. You’ll be presented with a format option. Select that option and choose NTFS.
It’ll take a few minutes but then you’ll be ready to use the software that will save you from the data loss nightmare.
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