A BACKUP IS GOOD FOR YOUR IMAGE

Let me tell you a scary story about your computer. One day, you turn it on and nothing happens. Oh the power comes on, your screen glows displaying the startup screen but there's no other activity. You stare at it for a moment in disbelief. It's always worked before. What's going on? Your hard drive has crashed. All of your work, your data, the digital pictures you took, the documents you wrote, the email you saved, all of it is gone, forever. Let that sink in for a moment before you read on. So how would you feel if that happened to you? Now for a reality check. It's not a story. It's real. It will happen to you and you best be prepared for it.

Your hard disk drive is a complex device with little magnetic discs inside spinning at a high rate of speed. Suspended less than a hair above these disks are little heads that zip back and forth reading and writing information. Why would you think that something so delicate and complex would never malfunction? All hard disk drives will fail. It's not "if" it will fail, it's simply a matter of "when." The only thing you can do to prepare for this inevitability is to make backups and make lots of them on a regular basis. But according to sources, less than 4 percent of us make backups and of those, even a smaller number of us make them on a regular basis. Why?

The reasons are many as to why we don't make backups. Most say they don't know how to make backups while others say they just don't have the time. Fortunately more backup developers are coming up with new ways to make backing up more simplified and less intrusive. Most backup techniques will back up all of the data files you created like documents and photos. The idea is that you don't need to backup the applications you purchased since you most likely have the discs on which they came. But if you think about it for a moment, there's more than just your work that needs backing up. You may not realize it but you've spent a great deal of time setting up your computer to get it where it is today. There's updates to all those programs you use, downloads you've saved and installed, even the organization of where all of your files and their folders have been placed. Plus the operating system has modified, adjusted and created all kinds of housekeeping information like the Windows Registry, device drivers, the list goes on and on. It might take you days, weeks and even longer trying to restore your computer to the state it was in before the hard drive crash. In fact you may never get it back to exactly where it was.

Fortunately there is a type of backup that will preserve all of that for you. It's called an image backup. Think of it like taking a snapshot of the hard disk drive. A snapshot or image backup is a perfect duplication of the hard drive right down to the bit level. Everything is perfectly preserved. So when the unthinkable happens, the image backup software literally overlays that snapshot image back onto the hard drive. The result is that every single little thing is put back exactly how it was at the moment the snapshot was taken. It truly is a thing of beauty. And a company called Acronis has taken the image backup to an even better level of improvement.

For starters, Acronis True Image Home 2009 ($49.99) lets you make incremental backups which wasn't possible in the early days. Used to be you took a snapshot and when you continued using your computer adding and deleting stuff, you had to take another snapshot (a full backup) when you wanted to backup again. That took a lot of time and space. True Image knows what you've changed since the last time you took a snapshot and backs up only those changes to your original backup image which is typically stored on another hard drive. As you can see, this feature alone saves you an enormous amount of time as well as space since backing up only the things that have changed takes far less time than backing up the entire hard drive over and over again. And that's just for starters.

True Image lets you search for files through multiple archives and allows you to restore a single or group of files rather than forcing you to restore an entire snapshot. The list of features found in the True Image line of backup products is impressive. To learn more about them, check out the Acronis website. There are versions for the home, small office and large enterprise business.

With True Image running on your PC, making backups can be almost totally automated, even unattended. But most importantly, when that day arrives, when you turn your on your PC and nothing happens, at least your scary story lets you live happily ever after.

www.acronis.com

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