Blog
My Revelation about backing up
Posted by Jeff Cavanaugh on Wednesday, December 23, 2009
I have 2 computers at home, one for work and one for family. The family computer, however, is also used by my wife for her job as a computer programmer which is done 100% from home. Now, being a geek, I don’t worry too much about my home computer. I know how to fix it if it breaks, I have Carbonite on there to back up my critical work and valued family files offsite automatically. I know how to clean up malware, recover data from failed hard drives, reinstall windows, etc.
However, the other day, I realized that my wife and I have customized the home computer so much it would be quite a scramble to get it reconfigured and get us both up to full productivity. Even with my black-belt geek skills it could take weeks to get back to 100%. Therefore, I decided to install a second hard drive and periodically store an entire image of my primary hard drive to it and keep as many versions of the primary hard drive as will fit on the second hard drive. This way, if my computer gets messed up, I can get it back EXACTLY as it was. This is not like system restore, this restores both system state and data, it restores everything and works independently of Windows. I can then get the latest version of data files from Carbonite.
This restore process is quick and painless. The second hard drive and the software to do the images costs about $200, but it is well worth it.
However, the other day, I realized that my wife and I have customized the home computer so much it would be quite a scramble to get it reconfigured and get us both up to full productivity. Even with my black-belt geek skills it could take weeks to get back to 100%. Therefore, I decided to install a second hard drive and periodically store an entire image of my primary hard drive to it and keep as many versions of the primary hard drive as will fit on the second hard drive. This way, if my computer gets messed up, I can get it back EXACTLY as it was. This is not like system restore, this restores both system state and data, it restores everything and works independently of Windows. I can then get the latest version of data files from Carbonite.
This restore process is quick and painless. The second hard drive and the software to do the images costs about $200, but it is well worth it.