Disaster Recovery Made Dead-Easy

We entrust ever more aspects of our lives to our PCs, from our bank details to the family photo album. These days, a home PC failure is often catastrophic. A friend had his disk drive crash on his PC the other day. He had to reinstall Windows and all his programs, which took him off the air for most of a week. This is known as ‘bare metal recovery’.

 

The simple way of avoiding this level of pain is to use disk imaging software to make a snapshot of your PC’s hard drive, which enables the full system with all its data and programs to be restored to that exact state when a PC refuses to boot up or Windows won’t open, or to ‘clone’ your whole system to a new hard drive after a disk crash.

 

The most popular choices for disk imaging are

§    Acronis True Image http://www.acronis.com/

§    Paragon Drive Image   http://www.paragon-software.com/

§    ShadowProtect from Storagecraft  http://www.storagecraft.com/

 

These programs are easy enough to use, and full restores are made possible with special boot CDs you burn which allow the programs to run in memory. They don’t cost a lot of money but the good news is that you can get basic versions for free. This PDF elaborates further on the technology and shows how to use the software with screenshots: http://www.technoledge.com.au/pdfs/seagate_disc_wizard.pdf

 

There’s only one catch: in order to get the free OEM version of Acronis True Image, you must have a Seagate, Maxtor or Western Digital disk drive. A single external USB hard drive is enough. The downloads are pretty hefty – in the order of 100mb:

Seagate/Maxtor http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

Western Digital http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp

 

Paragon simply offers an older version of the drive imaging software that will work with any and all disk drives http://www.paragon-software.com/free/db.html . Needless to say, you’ll receive offers to upgrade to the latest version from time to time.

 

Take a snapshot once a week on an external hard drive, or even once a month, and you’ll recover from a PC disaster in hours rather than days. If all goes wrong, and your PC refuses to even boot into Safe Mode, boot it up from the CD Acronis or Paragon has helped you cut and simply load back the last image. Assuming that you back your working data up every day, you simply update your data since the last image was taken and all is well again.

 

We haven’t covered theft or fire, but you have the option of buying a second external drive (their prices have come down so much lately) put an image on it and leave it with a friend or your parents or one of your kids. Now you can sleep with the sweetest of dreams.

We entrust ever more aspects of our lives to our PCs, from our bank details to the family photo album. These days, a home PC failure is often catastrophic. A friend had his disk drive crash on his PC the other day. He had to reinstall Windows and all his programs, which took him off the air for most of a week. This is known as ‘bare metal recovery’.

 

The simple way of avoiding this level of pain is to use disk imaging software to make a snapshot of your PC’s hard drive, which enables the full system with all its data and programs to be restored to that exact state when a PC refuses to boot up or Windows won’t open, or to ‘clone’ your whole system to a new hard drive after a disk crash.

 

The most popular choices for disk imaging are

§    Acronis True Image http://www.acronis.com/

§    Paragon Drive Image   http://www.paragon-software.com/

§    ShadowProtect from Storagecraft  http://www.storagecraft.com/

 

These programs are easy enough to use, and full restores are made possible with special boot CDs you burn which allow the programs to run in memory. They don’t cost a lot of money but the good news is that you can get basic versions for free. This PDF elaborates further on the technology and shows how to use the software with screenshots: http://www.technoledge.com.au/pdfs/seagate_disc_wizard.pdf

 

There’s only one catch: in order to get the free OEM version of Acronis True Image, you must have a Seagate, Maxtor or Western Digital disk drive. A single external USB hard drive is enough. The downloads are pretty hefty – in the order of 100mb:

Seagate/Maxtor http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

Western Digital http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp

 

Paragon simply offers an older version of the drive imaging software that will work with any and all disk drives http://www.paragon-software.com/free/db.html . Needless to say, you’ll receive offers to upgrade to the latest version from time to time.

 

Take a snapshot once a week on an external hard drive, or even once a month, and you’ll recover from a PC disaster in hours rather than days. If all goes wrong, and your PC refuses to even boot into Safe Mode, boot it up from the CD Acronis or Paragon has helped you cut and simply load back the last image. Assuming that you back your working data up every day, you simply update your data since the last image was taken and all is well again.

 

We haven’t covered theft or fire, but you have the option of buying a second external drive (their prices have come down so much lately) put an image on it and leave it with a friend or your parents or one of your kids. Now you can sleep with the sweetest of dreams.