Technical Tips - Backups and archiving
Now that the price of external hard disks has dropped so dramatically, there is absolutely no reason why anyone should neglect this essential piece of computer housekeeping.
Hardware
Perfectly adequate external hard disks are available on the High Street for between £50 and £100. There is very little to choose between the various brand-name manufacturers - no products were rated lower than 4, for example, when PC Pro magazine tested external hard disks in February 2008 - read [this article].
External hard disks have been promoted as providing "extra space" for your photo, video, and music files, but they are far better used to provide a backup for all your files. I recommend buying one with at least twice the capacity of the hard disk in your computer - if the computer has a 250GB hard disk, then buy a 500GB external hard disk. Most external hard disks connect to your computer using a "full-size" USB connector.
Software
It is not necessary to buy any special software to use your external hard disk as a backup device. If you are only concerned with safeguarding your data, just copy the complete "My Documents" folder from your computer to the external hard disk using Windows Explorer, then rename the folder on the external hard disk to something like "My Documents [Date]". This can be repeated as many times as the space on the external hard disk allows. It can, however, take a very long time and make the whole process so tedious that you will be discouraged from making backups as frequently as you should.
Recommended software
Acronis True Image Home [www.acronis.com] : This has been on the PC Pro magazine A-List for years, read [this article]. You're unlikely to find Acronis products on the High Street but they are available from most of the online stores, including Amazon. Acronis True Image Home 11.0 is currently retailing for between £20 and £25.
It is a very simple to use program, with basic options for backing-up your files, folders, or the entire hard disk. You then have the option of specifying full backups, or incremental backups which are significantly quicker. I backup all my data weekly, or more frequently if I have just added a significant number of precious files (such as digital photographs which must be deleted from the camera's memory card). I use the incremental backup option until the number of backup files becomes unwieldy, then I delete the lot and start over again with a full backup.
It is good practice to occasionally restore files from your backup archive to ensure that the process is working correctly and the backup files have not become corrupted.
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