How To Stay Safe Rather Than Sorry

The Age

Thursday September 20, 2007

Bill Bennett

People make all kinds of excuses for not backing up: they complain it takes too much time, interferes with normal computer tasks and is difficult to remember.

Backing up full hard drives can take many hours but that's hardly justification for not doing it. If time worries you, back up overnight.

In fact you can usually back up in the background while you get on with some, if not all, normal computer tasks. Performance may take a nosedive; after all, backing up is disk-intensive and chews up a lot of resources.

However, unless you are using seriously resource-hungry applications, the performance hit is less of an issue than it was. Today's PCs are overpowered for everyday applications such as word processing or web browsing, so there's usually more than enough headroom to handle a little housekeeping.

To remember to back up, you can usually schedule the tools to work automatically. Now the world seems awash with decent back-up software tools and applications that make those excuses look weaker.

The excellent SyncBack (2brightsparks.com), which we've looked at before, is free. Microsoft has integrated a good set of tools into Windows Vista (though the exact set of tools depends on your version of Vista). External hard drives often come with bundled back-up software.

Spend money and you'll get even better back-up tools. For $65, Acronis True Image Home 10 (acronis.com) combines two types of back-up applications in a single package. It can image a hard drive - that is, store a carbon copy of the data on an external drive or another partition, making it easy to recover everything after a big crash. Unlike other imaging programs, True Image can create the back-up partition. This can be a tricky, and somewhat scary, task for non-experts.

At the same time, True Image can make conventional back-ups of your documents, emails, music and video files, as well as store all the essential settings for popular applications.

As in all the best back-up applications, it can do all this in the background and you can schedule back-ups to take place automatically. It took four hours to image the 90 GB of data on my PC.

Acronis' main line of business is corporate back-up. The home version of True Image has a slight "big computing" feel. That's a good thing - IT professionals don't play games with their data, nor should you. -- BILL BENNETT

© 2007 The Age

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