Backing up Your Hard Drive

     By Gene Barlow
User Group Relations
Copyrighted August 2004

Backing up your hard drive is the most important thing you should do to
protect your computer system. Yet, I am constantly surprised to find that as
few as 10% of my smart user group audiences have a good backup procedure in
place. Hard drive crashes are quite common and it is very painful to rebuild
a computer system after a hard drive crash. Anti-virus software may offer
some protection, but fast moving viruses can get through this protection and
crash your hard drive. It may take you days or weeks to recover from a hard
drive failure and your important data files are gone forever. So, protect
your computer by backing up your hard drive on a regular basis and avoid the
pain of a hard drive failure.

For the past few years I have recommended a sophisticated backup process
that would adequately backup all aspects of your computer system. Using a
file backup utility, I suggested you backup your important data files at the
end of each day. Then, to protect your full system, I suggested you should
backup your entire hard drive using a full system backup utility each month.
I also suggested that you separate out your data files into a different
partition on your hard drive to further protect these important files. This
approach is outlined in an article that I wrote titled, "Backing Up your
Hard Drive". You can read it on my web site at www.ugr.com/nl0102.html.

While many of you followed my suggestions on backing up your hard drive,
many of you are still not doing anything to protect your hard drive from
failure. Perhaps my backup approach was too complex to understand or too
difficult to follow. Fortunately for you, technology has made some dramatic
advances in the past couple of years and now there is a better and easier
way of doing your backups. This article will show you the best way to
backing up your hard drive and tell you what hardware and software products
to use to follow this approach. It is so easy that everybody should start to
backup their hard drive. All you have to know is the secret of how to do it,
and your computer can be safe and secure.

Backup Hardware: The first step to having a successful backup procedure is
choosing the right backup hardware to use to save your backups to. For
years, users have been burning CDs for their backups. This approach was full
of frustrations and problems. No wonder folks hated to do backups. First, it
seems that creating a backup and then burning it to many CDs could overtax
many computer systems. If anything went wrong, the entire backup process
could cancel, leaving you with several burnt CDs, but not the complete
backup you needed. Worst than that, the backup might appear to be complete,
but the CDs were corrupt and would not restore properly. Thank goodness, CDs
have been replaced with a much more reliable backup media.

A couple of years ago, external hard drives entered the computer marketplace
in large numbers. Today, an external hard drive is the ideal backup media to
use. Instead of sitting by your computer for hours to feed it another blank
CD, all you need to do is to attach your external hard drive and forget
about it. Your backup will be taken automatically without your being
involved. No more drudgery of making backups to CDs.

Why are external hard drives the ideal backup media? First, they are large
enough to backup your main hard drive on one device. You do not need to
backup to multiple CDs, so the whole process can be done without your
involvement. Second, backing up to an external hard drive is many times
faster than burning CDs. An external hard drive is almost as fast as the
internal hard drives on your computer. Third, external hard drives are much
more reliable at saving your important files. CDs can easily become
scratched or flawed and not protect your important backups. Finally,
external hard drives are relatively inexpensive to buy and use. You may
actually save money over the cost of burning a lot of CDs.

What should you look for when buying an external hard drive for backup
purposes? External hard drives come in two basic flavors - USB2 and
Firewire. One is just as fast as the other and both will do an excellent job
of backing up your main hard drive. You will need to attach the external
hard drive to your computer using either a USB2 port or a Firewire port on
your computer. Most computer today come with a USB port on them, so these
are the more popular type of external hard drives. Just be sure your
computer doesn't have one of the older USB1 ports on it instead of the
faster USB2 ports. If you have an older USB1 port, you can still attach and
run your USB2 external hard drive, but it will run at the slower USB1 speed.
In this situation, you can add a USB2 port to your computer for a small
additional price.

The external hard drives come in a couple of sizes - miniature and standard
drives. The miniature external hard drives have a 2.5 inch laptop computer
hard drive inside a small case. These drives are small enough to fit in your
pocket and are very light to carry. They do have a couple of disadvantages
to them that you should be aware of. First, they only hold 20GB, 40GB, or
80GB of backup files. This may not be big enough to backup your 300GB main
hard drive. Second, you will pay quite a bit for the small size of these
miniature drives. The 20GB drives cost about $160, the 40GB drives are about
$200 and the 80GB drives are over $300. So, you end up paying a lot for the
small size.

If you don't mind having a slightly larger external hard drive, you can get
one with much more capacity and for less money. These larger external hard
drives contain standard 3.5 inch hard drives inside the case and are
available in capacities starting at about 80GB and go up to 300GB and
larger. An 80GB or 120GB external hard drive is an excellent size for most
backup needs. If you watch for sales on these drives, you may find an 80GB
hard drive for under $100. I have seen them as low as $69. The 120GB
external hard drives will be more expensive, but can be found for as low as
$99. So, check the ads in your local paper and you may find a great deal on
external USB2 hard drives.

Backup Software: The second part of having the perfect backup approach is
using the right backup software product. There are two basic types of backup
software available - file backup utilities and full system image backup
utilities. Older file backup utilities would backup individual files. These
utilities were slow since they had to use the operating system to find and
retrieve each file separately. We have hundreds of thousands of files on our
hard drive and so working on individual files, one at a time, is very slow.
A better backup utility will backup your entire hard drive (a partition at a
time) and does this at the hard drive sector level. These types of backup
utilities create backup images of your hard drive that you can save to your
external hard drive. To conserve space, these images are compressed to about
half their normal size which permits you to keep many backup images on your
external hard drive. So, the first think to look for in your backup software
is the ability to create compressed images of your entire hard drive.

While an image backup utility is a major step in the right direction, it is
not the ultimate solution. With full backup images, you still end up backing
up your entire hard drive each time, even if only a small portion of the
drive has changed since the last backup. So, the images contain a lot of
unchanged files that do not need to be backed up again. So, the secret is to
find an image backup utility that can do incremental backup images. With the
incremental backup image approach, only the changed sectors on a hard drive
are backed up and not those parts of the hard drive that have not changed
since the last backup. Incremental backup images are much smaller in size
and complete much quicker than a full backup image.

A little calculation at this point may help you understand another reason
why the incremental backup image feature is so important. Let's say you have
a 120GB main hard drive that is a third full. That means it has about 40GB
of files on it. A full condensed image of this hard drive would be about
20GB in size (with a compression of about 50%). That means that you could
store four separate full backup images on an 80GB external hard drive. Using
the incremental backup image approach, you may be able to store 30 or 40
separate backups on the same 80GB external hard drive. Because you can keep
more incremental images on your external hard drive, you can make your
backups more frequently than if you were limited to only four full backups.
Hence, your backups would be more current with the incremental image
approach versus the full backup approach. This means less lost files since
the last backup. This is of major importance when considering a backup
approach.

So, the secret to choosing the best backup software is to look for a full
system backup utility that can do incremental backup images. There have been
a couple of expensive enterprise software products that offer the
incremental backup image feature (for example, Symantec's V2i Protector
Desktop Edition v2), but there is only one consumer backup utility that I am
aware of that offers the incremental backup image feature and that is the
Acronis True Image 8.0 product. This excellent backup utility was awarded PC
Magazine's Editors Choice award as the best backup imaging utility on the
market. PC World calls True Image the leader in the field of incremental
backup images. Using this excellent backup utility with an external hard
drive will provide you with the most perfect backup approach available
today.

How to Backup your Hard Drive: To complete this article, let me suggest how
you would do your backups using an external hard drive and an incremental
backup image utility. I would suggest that you set up a regular schedule to
make your backup images. For the average user, I would make a full backup of
your hard drive at the beginning of the month and then an incremental backup
image at the end of each week that follows. So, you would have one full
backup image and 3-4 much smaller incremental backup images each month. At
the beginning of the next month, make another full backup image and follow
this again with weekly incremental images. Save all of these images on your
external hard drive and don't delete any of the older images until you start
to run out of space on the drive. If you have a very active computer system,
you could make a full backup at the beginning of the week and incremental
backup images at the end of each day. Most users will not need to do the
backups this frequently, but some may want the extra protection of more
frequent backups. Either way, the approach is the same, just the frequency
is changed. With True Image 8.0 you can set up the software to make these
backups automatically. So, set it up and forget it. Your backups will occur
as scheduled.

If at any time, you need to restore one or a few of your files, you can
simply copy these files out of your compressed image files using a facility
in True Image. If you need to restore your full hard drive, you can do this
also, even if the main hard drive is empty and not bootable. True Image will
boot from a special CD to permit you to quickly restore the entire hard
drive from the image files. So, you can quickly restore a few files or your
entire hard drive using Acronis True Image 8.0.

Finally, you may be wondering why I recommend keeping all of your full and
incremental backup images on your external hard drive and not deleting them
after you make a new image. You need to understand that the full image you
make at the beginning of the month and the incremental images that follow it
each week go together in a set. True Image needs all of them to restore your
hard drive to the way it was when you made the last incremental image.
During the restore, it will combine the beginning full image with each of
the incremental images to recreate the hard drive. It does this very quickly
whether you are retrieving a few individual files from the image set or
recreating the entire hard drive. Now, let's suppose that a stealth virus
got on your hard drive and was captured in the last incremental image you
made. You certainly do not want to restore your hard drive with this virus
on it. So, instead, you indicate to True Image to restore your hard drive
from the incremental image you made just before the image containing the
stealth virus. That restores your system to a point in the past when it was
still clean of the virus.

Over time, you will build up a collection of backup images on your external
hard drive that will let you see what files were on the drive at any point
of time in the past few months. If you deleted a file some months ago and
now want to get it back, you can indicate to True Image to look in a backup
image before you deleted the file and you can copy it back to your hard
drive from the image files. Having a history of all of the files that have
been on your hard drive is a very powerful and useful function. Only with an
incremental backup image software product could you afford to keep all of
this history on a modest external hard drive. Acronis True Image 8.0 with an
external hard drive is the perfect way to backup your main hard drive.

How to Order Acronis True Image 8.0: Acronis is offering this excellent
product to user group members and their friends at a special discount price
of just $34. To take advantage of this special price, you need to go to
http://www.usergroupstore.com and click on any of the yellow "Buy Now"
buttons. This will take you to the secure web order form where you can order
your copy of Acronis True Image 8.0 at the user group discount. Complete the
form including the special order code of UGNL0804 and submit the form. Your
product will be processed in a few hours and will be delivered in 2-3 days.

If you have any questions about this article or how to backup your hard
drive, please contact me at barlow@ugr.com. I will get back to you shortly
with the answers to your questions. I would like to see everyone's computer
protected with a good backup approach. The method outlined in this article
should do exactly that for your computer. Don't be sorry. Backup your
computer today.

Gene Barlow
User Group Relations gene@ugr.com
PO Box 911600 www.ugr.com
St George, UT 84791-1600                     435-652-3005

This is one of a series of monthly technical articles that I plan to
distribute on a regular basis in the coming months. Watch for them and learn
more about your computer and its hard drive. User group newsletter editors
may print this article in their monthly newsletter as long as the article is
printed in its entirety and not cut or edited. Please send me a copy of the
newsletter containing the article so that I can see what groups are running
the articles.