How To Backup Your Hard Drive
By: Otis F. Cooper
We all know that we should back up our system as soon as possible. But if you're like most of us, you will get to it tomorrow. The problem is that tomorrow rarely ever comes until you experience a serious computer failure and then it’s too late.
Taking the time to backup your data or entire hard drive is not as painstaking as it may seem. And the rewards of doing so will be great should your system experience a crash.
WINDOWS AND OTHER BACKUP SOFTWARE
If you have Windows XP you will need to install the new Windows backup utility from the Windows XP cdrom. Just place the WinXP cdrom in your cdrom drive and locate the line D:\VALEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP.
Here you see the first letter as D but if your optical drive has a different drive letter, exchange the D with your drive's letter. To install the utility, click on the file named NTBackup.msi.
The backup utility will be installed to the system tools group. Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and Backup. There is a neat wizard that will walk you through the backup process.
WinXP's backup utility will backup your entire hard drive and will make a recovery disk to boot.
One neat third party backup software you can try is NewTech InfoSystems at http://www.ntius.com where you can download their trial version and put it to use for 30 days. And if it’s your cup of tea, the full version will run you about $79.95
INCREMENTAL OR DIFFERENTIAL BACKUPS
You should back up your entire hard drive when you perform your first backup. After that it is best to perform an Incremental backup. This type of backup only allows you to backup files that have changed since your last performed backup.