Get in a Good Habit: Back Up Your Data

Let's Include the Kitchen Sink

What do you do if your hard drive dies? Buy and install another one. But then what? If you have a data backup created with Zip Backup to CD or Automatic Backup, you install Windows, then your hardware drivers, then your applications, then your utilities. And then, finally, everything from your backup.

Wouldn't you rather boot from a special CD, then restore everything — Windows, drivers, programs, and data — from a single file? That's why a drive-imaging program is worth your consideration. These aren't absolutely essential (reinstalling everything is a hassle; losing your data is a disaster), but should catastrophe strike, you'll be glad you bought one.

These programs, which include Drive Image and Norton Ghost, both $70 and both now owned by Symantec, don't back up specific files — they back up the entire disk, sector by sector (well, they skip the blank ones and compress the others). In a matter of minutes, they can restore the entire drive to the exact condition it was in when you made the image.

The drive imager I recommend is the $50 Acronis True Image 7.0. Not only is it less expensive, but it has the unique ability to do incremental backups, making it the first imager that can do the job of a conventional backup program. (And yes, you can recover a particular file without restoring your entire disk to an earlier condition.)

With today's auxiliary drives, and software like Zip Backup to CD, Iomega Automatic Backup, and Acronis True Image, there's no reason not to keep your system backed up.

What's your excuse?