How To Back Up a Hard Drive

By backing up the entire PC, you can protect your computer from natural disasters, viruses, crashes and other unpredicted accidents. Whether it is operating system, applications, settings, video, pictures and financial documents; everything you can back up if your computer fails. The Backup utility in Windows XP Professional lets you keep your files and information. If your hard drive is damaged or erased, you can effortlessly restore the data from the archived copy.

There are several ways to back up your data, therefore select the technique that works best for you. In general, the most convenient and safest option is to back up your important data to an external medium. A few popular alternatives include USB, CDs, Zip disks and Flash drives. The choice you make use of will depend upon numerous aspects such as how much software you have installed and the quantity of data you would like to back up.

If your system has a drive which supports writable DVDs or CDs you can physically backup your hard drive on this type of media. Writable CDs and DVDs can hold from 650 megabytes (MB) up to 4 gigabtyes (GB) and more of data. An additional option is an external disk drive. Large sizes are available that makes it possible to backup your complete hard drive in lots of cases. Since the hard disk drives are very fast, you can copy a whole drive very fast. To back up your files to an external hard disk drive, follow these instructions.

Steps:

1. Click Start, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Backup. If the Backup option does not appear on the System Tools menu, you can install it.

2. The Restore Wizard or Backup appears. Click Next. On the Restore or Backup page, click Next.

3. On the What to Back Up page, click All information on this computer, then click Next.

4. On the Backup Type, Destination, and Name page, click Choose a place to save your backup, and pick your external hard disk drive. Then click Next.

5. Click Finish on the Completing the Backup or Restore Wizard page.

6. Windows Backup saves a copy of your files to the exterior hard disk drive. When the backup is finished, click Close.

The most significant part of the backup plan is to backup the entire hard drive as a minimum one time a month. Having this backup in place will look after from a major failure of the total hard drive.