If You Don’t Have A Top Rated Hard Drive Image Solution Yet, You're At Risk! Do Not Wait Any Longer--Get One!

A hard drive image of your computer is a must. Losing any of your important files is a tragedy you don’t want, I’ve done it. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. Whether it has or not, you need a backup plan now.

Last night I had the craziest dream. My son and I were at a karate dojo that was offering a free introductory lesson. For some reason I had my laptop with me.

The dojo had created some free software that had something to do with karate so I installed it while we were waiting for class to start. That was a mistake.

Instantly, my laptop went into convulsions as a virus made its way through the circulatory system, slowly draining the life away. Its heart shuddered, then…flat line. My first words were, “Oh no, this can’t be good”. OK, maybe those weren't my first words but they were the G rated ones.

My second words were, “It’s a good thing I have hard drive image solution at home. I literally, in my dream, thought of the exact backup solution that I really do have in my office. Today I’m going to share my thoughts with you on this.

Get A Backup Solution Quick

If you’ve ever lost your data you probably went though a process similar to grief. First, denial, then anger, followed by bargaining (with God or whomever you think can fix this), then depression sets in, and finally, you accept it.

Once this happens, you can deal with it. But how you deal with it is the question.

Some people start by piecing back together the ruins of the empire one hour at a time. They sort through old floppies and hard drives. Remember zip drives? “I wonder if I still have…”

Reinstall the operating system to the factory condition. Install all the programs again. Uninstall all the crap that came with the computer again. Change all the settings back (though you can’t remember what they were), Download some of the stuff you lost. Live with the fact that your documents folder is a lot lighter now.

This is not the recommended course of action

Part of a great Internet security plan is a great backup plan including a hard drive image.

We forget that EVERYTHING on our computers is just a long, long, long string of 1s and 0s. Wow, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t remember all of them in order.

I recommend a hard drive image package instead. Two heads really are better than one (does that analogy work?) In the case of my laptop’s cardiac arrest I would have done the following steps:

1. Insert the Acronis True Image 11.0 boot CD and start up the computer

2. Restore the image from my hard drive image to the laptop

3. Copy the most recent SyncToy data from my profile on the backup drive—it’s only about two hours old

4. Do a couple of tweaks to settings and button it up

5. Sigh if I’ve lost anything at all, which is unlikely

Which do you prefer?

The first option takes at least hours but probably days and you’re virtually guaranteed not to get everything back. The second option restores the system to exactly the way it was just hours or even minutes ago. Can you say no-brainer?

After two or three crises of my own, I logged on to TigerDirect.com and NewEgg.com and ordered a few simple tools that every computer user should have (and I waited WAY too long to buy).

• A USB external backup drive, preferably twice as big as my hard drive

• A top of the line hard drive image package like Norton Ghost

• An hour by hour backup plan such as Microsoft’s free SyncToy software

• Optional but still a GOOD idea: an online backup service for at least some of my documents such as the My Documents folder, Pictures, Music, etc.

Yeah, yeah, I know. “If you owned a Mac, you wouldn’t have these problems.” Right. I think even the holier-than-thou Mac users (just kidding guys, Macs are great) can learn something here. Anything can happen.

So, here’s my basic philosophy in backing up: Today’s equipment is so cheap that you should be backing up virtually every hour or even less if you like. What I do is the following:

1. Initially, I made an image with Acronis True Image 11 of the entire hard drive

2. Every night Acronis is scheduled to do an incremental backup

3. Every night, my Web Root AntiVirus & AntiSpyWare backup feature does an incremental backup on THEIR servers of certain folders and files in my Windows Vista profile known as “Dad”.

4. Every 15 minutes, SyncToy does an echo of files from my Dad folder to the external drive. Echo means that if I add, delete, or modify files the changes are reflected on the backup drive. Thus my Dad folder is exactly the same in both places.

5. NOTE: Settings, settings, settings. This is huge. I’ve adjusted settings in so many programs to just the way I like them. Losing these tweaks would be reason enough for me to image my drive. A backup of the documents won’t do it.

I’m even considering a USB flash drive backup or other USB drive that’s portable. Here’s why:

Right now I’m typing this in a restaurant. There’s no backup here so a USB drive is a simple solution just in case the laptop decides to have an aneurism and die. It’s covered under HP’s warranty but this article would be lost forever.

But…since you’re reading the article, I guess that didn’t happen!