I still help out family and friends to restore data and/or rebuild their computers after they have not taken backups.
Typical reasons given are:
- Backups are a nuisance and time consuming
- I don’t know how to do backups
- I have nowhere to backup my data to
- I backed up my data to the same drive but on another partition but now the drive has a problem
External USB or eSATA hard disks have really come down in price. Unless you really don’t care about your data on the computer, consider this extra drive as important as any part of the computer that you need.
Here is the formula:
Look at your hard disk(s). How big are they?
Buy an external drive that is slightly bigger than your laptop or desktop drive space.
Now, if you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 you already have what you need installed in the computer.
Make sure that the external drive is connected to your computer and that it occupies a drive letter.
Access the Control Panel and then Security and select Backup your Computer.
The screen will look like this:
Select Create a system image.
Now, select any partitions that you want to backup as the source and pick the drive letter of your external drive as the target. This backup will run in the background while you work. I typically do mine Friday night before bed. Otherwise, start the backup and go to bed.
As a note, make sure that the computer will not go into power management state while you are away from it to ensure successful backup completion.
That’s all there is to it folks!