What Is A System Backup And Why It Is Vital

Posted on: September 26th, 2008

I’ve run into numerous cases when hard drive crash, system corruption, virus damage made it necessary to reinstall the whole system.

It’s always a painstaking and slow process. It’s a rare thing that someone keeps their installation CDs organized and knows where all the necessary product keys are. So the process usually involves a lot of hunting, improvising and makeshift solutions. It’s not uncommon to take 2-3, or even 4 hours to get a computer back in the state, more or less, where it was before.

This is true even if they had their data backed up.

Why?

Almost all backup software specializes in saving user files. They tend to stay away from backing up system files because that’s a tougher bullet to bite. I give you an example: a customer who did backups everyday had a system corruption problem, one of the Windows Registry files got corrupted. For some reason her computer was not running the System Restore service so no backup copies of registry files were available. She told me that her whole hard drive gets backed up regularly. I looked and looked but her external hard drive contained pretty much everything except for the file I needed. So I had to reinstall Windows to make it work again!

On the other hand better backup software are capable of saving your whole Windows installation with every detail. Meaning all files, all settings, all installed software – the ‘whole 9 yards’. With that kind of a backup it takes half an hour to an hour to get everything back to the way it was before a hard drive crash, or corruption – down to the last icon and bookmark you had saved.

I have several positive examples, too, where a full system backup was kept and the restore operation was smooth and painless. In these cases the computer was back up-and-running in less time and the no software had to be reinstalled or reconfigured, etc.

Simply put: Having at least one full, system backup is very advisable and can save you a lot of money.

There are two programs that I can recommend to do system backups:

- Drive Image XML: It’s a free software and works well but it does require some advanced knowledge of computers to back up and restore a system.

- Acronis Trueimage: It’s not free but it well worth the money ($35-$50). With that you can set up a scheduled system backup, and also create a recovery CD or DVD that is easy to use.

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