Last week the hard drive on my Dell laptop crashed. Fortunately, I was able to put it into an external case and get almost everything off of the drive. The is a reminder to always back up your hard drive onto an external device — it can be a jump drive, external HD, DVD-R, doesn’t matter. JUST BACK IT UP!!! I am usually pretty good about backing everything up, but once you get lax about it and forget then you are at risk.
There are two different types of backups that I use. The first is to back up all of your documents, pictures, music, videos, etc. And the second is to do a sector by sector back up or image of your drive. This second method will backup all of the partitions on your drive, your programs, setting, registry, EVERYTHING. So if your hard drive fails and you use the sector by sector method you will be able to restore your computer exactly as it was when you ran that backup.
Drawbacks? Well the drawback to backing up only your files is that if your hard drive crashes you will need to buy a new drive, install your operating system, install all of your software, and load all of your files. This can be time consuming. The drawback to the sector by sector method is that it can take a lot of drive space and the backups take longer to run.
I don’t care which one you choose, just back up your stuff!
Tags: backup, hard drive