There is no computer malfunction as devastating as losing the contents of your hard drive. This can happen due to a virus, or a hardware or software malfunction. Backing up your computer regularly is a must and there are several ways to do it. The most common way is to use a program that breaks up the contents of your hard drive into chunks and save it on another external hard drive. In case of hard drive failure, you can rebuild your old drive with those chunks.
Thatžs not the way I like to do it as my first line of defense. I confess, I still do backup that way as well, but itžs not my primary way. Call me neurotic or squeamish but I donžt like chunks.
If my hard drive fails and I have something important to do, I want to have an EXACT COPY of my hard drive already saved. I donžt want to have to rebuild anything or look for a disk to reboot my computer with the saved chunked data. It should still work of course (as long as the internal hard drive is not irreparably damaged) and eventually you have to deal with the computeržs problem internal drive, but who wants an ulcer? Frankly Ižll pay a wee bit for piece of mind.
The answer is to make a clone, a copy, or an exact intact image of your hard drive. That way, I can just take my external drive (which is a clone of my desktop) attach it to old 50 dollar laptop via USB and boom ‚” my whole computer shows up as a new drive on my laptop. No need to look for any disks or reassemble chunks and ZERO downtime and zero lost files.‚
Herežs how I do it. I buy an external drive that is the exact same size as my computeržs internal drive. That way when I clone the drive, I clone it exactly. You should know that that backup external drive can ONLY be used for backup in this way. You canžt save other files on that external drive, you can only save the clone of your internal hard drive. Each time you re-backup your computer onto that external, it deletes the previous backup. My 500 gig internal drive takes about 1.5 hours to clone onto the Western Digital 500 gig external drive (which costs $130.00 dollars 3 monts ago) via firewire (you can of course use USB).
There are many programs that can do this but the one I use and like best is Acronis True Image 11. It costs about 50 dollars and you can try it for free. When you load it up youžll see different choices on how to backup. To clone your hard drive DO NOT CHOOSE BACKUP AND RESTORE. That option backs up your hard drive in chunks. Instead choose DISK UTILITIES and then Clone Disk. I use manual mode after that and follow the prompts carefully and I MAKE SURE TO ‹“KEEP DATAž WHEN IT ASKS HOW I WANT TO MODIFY MY OLD DRIVE AND I CHOOSE ‹“AS ISž (because both drives are the exact same size) when it asks how I want to move data from the old to new drive.
The other program I am somewhat familiar with that does just about the same thing is Norton Ghost. Again to make an exact copy of your drive (non-chunk) donžt choose Back it up now, instead choose Copy My Hard drive (advanced) and follow the prompts very carefully.
Using either of these methods gives you the peace of mind that even if your hard drive crashes in a terrible way, you can still work from a new computer by plugging your external into it. Obviously, youžll need to copy or clone your internal drive regularly to have the freshest copy. If you have irreplaceable photos and other files on your internal hard drive, it is also safest to burn them to CD or DVD.
Hi Marko. Thanks a lot for this great post !
I just got Acronis True Image and I’m so pleased with it I had to tell you.
First for those that think “backups” suit them best, well Acronis is a VERY good piece of software for that purpose. It’ll do backups every which way you think is suitable for you.
Second, contrary to what you say in your post, Marko, you don’t have to have a disk with the exact same size as your C drive to be able to “clone” it.It will clone your disk to a larger drive, leaving you with more “free” space on it.
This is a very interesting point as it allows you to upgrade your drive without having the problems associated with the re-installation of all the programs you use. You save this way unbelievable amounts of time.
The way to do it is to install a new drive (here you can install a much larger volume than your actual C drive)in your PC and clone your actual C drive to it. You then remove your c drive and connect the new drive in its place. Your computer will reboot directly on the new drive and you will have all your programs running as well as more space if you chose a larger new drive.
I tried this and it works just fine. $50 is really not much for all Acronis can do in ways of cloning or doing backups plus many other utilities.
The cloning of your drive is, in my opinion, a very superior way to a backup to keep copies of all your data as it allows you to have the data ready to be used, without the hassle of a restore operation.
By the way, disk rot is maybe possible.… but if you keep your hard-disks in the same conditions as you keep your CD/DVD’s your hard-disks will become useless BEFORE any of you CD/DVD.
DVD’s did not exist 10 years ago but CD’s did and I have some more than 20 years old with absolutely NO sign of rot… The info on them is still very intact.
Thanks again Marko for all this good information you give. It is really appreciated.
Clement
Thanks for sharing your experience on this Clement!
Second, contrary to what you say in your post, Marko, you donžt have to have a disk with the exact same size as your C drive to be able to …œclone‚ it.It will clone your disk to a larger drive, leaving you with more …œfree‚ space on it.
This is a very interesting point as it allows you to upgrade your drive without having the problems associated with the re-installation of all the programs you use. You save this way unbelievable amounts of time.
The way to do it is to install a new drive (here you can install a much larger volume than your actual C drive)in your PC and clone your actual C drive to it. You then remove your c drive and connect the new drive in its place. Your computer will reboot directly on the new drive and you will have all your programs running as well as more space if you chose a larger new drive.
That’s cool Clement — I did not know that. Although it probably works as you suggest, 99% of people will not remove HDs from their computer and boot from another. I’ll include myself there. And with external drives being SO cheap, I think it’s just easier to buy an external HD that matches the capacity of the internal HD. I am happy you are happy with Acronis though — I love it and use it every week.
First, thanks for a great post. Second, well spoken Yves! Cloning and backups are two different things, and I consider backups far more important. I’m using SyncBack and that will take me about 10 minutes to make sure my 60 GB of photos are stored also on my second internal hard drive. As SyncBack keeps track of my current files at the second hard drive does it identify the new files very fast. I run SyncBack **at least** once a day. I also backup when I import to Lightroom, which I can delete as soon as I’ve run SyncBack. The second hard drive gets copied once a week to an external hard drive that i circulate off site (as you know we have frequent wild fires here in San Diego so off site storage is a must).
Thanks for that carbonite link John! I have been meaning to investigate their service at some point. I wonder how many gigs you get for 50/yr though.
Yves — thanks SO much for that great explanation. I think what is obvious is that there is no ‘best’ solution for everyone. For sure you are not an average computer user.
“Cloning disks is only feasible if your computer only has one hard drive (mine has four).” I would be willing to bet that 99% of all computer users have only 1 internal HD.
As I mentioned in the post, I do backup up using the chunks method via incremental backup as well. But I LOVE feeling secure that there is an easy clone of my HD at arms length.
It goes without saying though as john pointed out that backing up in multiple ways is best.
What I did not know and am very surprised to hear is disc rot. I have cd’s that are over 12 years old that ‘seem’ perfect.…but now I’m going back to check them. Why would a disk rot if you don’t live in a swamp or a flodded basement? HMMM
Thanks Yves!
Marko
Another thought — –there is no such thing as too much backup/redundancy!!!
The online backup services such as http://www.carbonite.com and http;//www.mozy.com look like a deal — $50 a year for complete backup!!!
Unfortunately, these services are not available for Mac yet, but when they are, I’m signing up — cheap insurance…
No, I will not rely solely on one method/strategy of protecting my valuable files– I’ll use more than one — REDUNDANCY, REDUNDANCY, REDUNDANCY!!!
Cheers,
John
Well Marko, I am not too sure about this as a backup strategy. As far as I am concerned, the purpose of backing up is to restore. There are a few things important when selecting a method to back up data, which are your RTO and your RPO and RPD. These are respectively your Recovery Time Objective, Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Depth Objective. The RTO is the maximum time it may take for you to restore your system to an operational state. The RPO is the point in time to which you fall back when restoring a backup, which is the data you lose even though you backed up. (For instance, if you backup every Sunday and your hard drive crashes on Wednesday, you have lost everything new or changed since the last good backup copy from Sunday). Your RDO says something about how many steps you can go back in selecting data backups to restore from.
Now, if you make a backup every day with a cloned image of your entire hard disk, your recovery point is a maximum of 24 hours old, which is good. But, by overwriting this image your RDO is only 1. This means that if you deleted some photographs by accident, the next day they will be gone out of your backup as well, you will have no way to restore them. As you say your RPO is quite fast, the image can probably be restored in less than an hour, which is great.
There are some side notes though:
– You keep backing up the same old data every time, which is slow and cumbersome. Very likely 95% of the data in your backup is exactly the same from the day before.
– Cloning disks is only feasible if your computer only has one hard drive (mine has four).
– You may not want to mix operating system and program files with your actual data for backup. It is very likely you will want your photos in a few years from now, but you donžt care about the millions of .dll files you have backed up every day.
A solution to most of these issues is doing an incremental or differential backup. What I do myself is integrate backing up my photographs with my photography workflow in Lightroom. Upon importing a backup copy of my RAW files is made to three places:
– The target import location on an internal disk
– A backup location on another physical internal disk (incremental)
– A backup location on an external disk (incremental) which I disconnect and store safely every night.
I also make backup copies of the Lightroom metadata catalogue database to two different places as well, separate from the actual photos.
This way when I come home from a shoot, and I import 60 photos, only those 60 photos are backed up. I couldnžt care less about losing my operating system, because reinstalling that is peanuts compared to losing my data. This way, for me, I have a secure backup strategy which allows for fast and selective restores, independent of my operating system (I run Ubuntu most of the time, but use Windows XP for Lightroom, and am going to buy a Mac sometime soon‚¦ (waiting for the new Macbook Prožs)).
Just a reminder in case you don’t know: burning to CD or DVD is much less futureproof than storing data on a harddisk. Unless you have perfect archiving conditions (cool, dry, no sunlight), burn at the lowest possible speed and buy the best CD+/-R(W) or DVD+/-R(W) available; your CD/DVD will no longer be readable after several years (6–8 years on average) due to disk rot. A solution for this is to reburn the disks every few years.
Just my 2 cts.
Thanks so much for those comments John and Nico! I should have mentioned that I use this method on a PC…but I’m sure most people figured it out. I have been considering a Mac as my next laptop. Good to know there are easy solutions for macs!
An excellent post — -
To me, this is the weakest link in all of Digital Imaging: the fact that you can lose all of your images/data in a heartbeat without a proper backup strategy — -
I also just blogged on this:
http://www.wattsdigital.com/blog1 …
I like your strategy — - I employ it also by copying my whole computer, not just one hard drive…I’m on a Mac, and am using the latest upgrade from them, OS 10.5 Leopard…It includes a program called “Time Machine” that does exactly that — copies your entire computer to an external drive…
Cheers,
John
I use SuperDuper for Mac. New Macs come with Time Machine, but I really like how SD works. I have a 250GB drive with a partition for backups and one for storing other files. So far I haven’t had to use it (knock on wood), but it’s better to be ready!