Data Backup Data Backup Introduction Imagine it. All the pictures you can’t replace. All the links to websites that you had in your  browser. Programs you’ve spent good money on  and have now lost the serial numbers for.  Important emails, and the addresses of all the  friends and colleagues that are now gone  forever. Well, you get the picture. What to do? What you need Well, the solution is actually quite simple. You  just need 2 things: top quality backup software, and somewhere to backup all your stuff to. For the backup software, there’s really no  contest for the home and small office user. You  need Acronis True Image. We provide a link to it here. We use it, and think it’s the best there is.  So does everyone else. The other thing you need is a separate external  hard drive. So first, here’s the links. The External Drive It should be a simple matter to install the  external drive. Usually, it’s just a matter of  plugging in the mains and then the USB cable.  Note: We don’t want to install the software that comes with the drive, so don’t let it. We are  going to use the Acronis software instead.  Once you have the drive installed, you’ll want to partition it. Ideally you should set the size of the individual partitions to match the size of the  drives they are backing up. A desktop internal  drive these days tends to be from 500GB   upwards, and the drives even in laptops these  days tend to be from 350GB at the cheap end to  500GB and up at the more expensive end. How Big? Ideally, your system drive should be partitioned  into at least 2, and preferably 3, partitions. There  should be a partition of a generous 100GB for  Windows and nothing else. Next, you’ll want a  partition of around 200GB or so to install the  programs you are using. Finally, divide the  remaining space into a couple of partitions of  roughly equal size to hold the data that you  actually generate. If you then mirror this on your  backup drive, it simplifies the backups no end.  Don’t worry about the actual partition sizes, or  whether a partition is logical or not. You can  change any of this at any time with the Acronis  software. Software Next you need to install the Acronis software. As the first task, it will get you to set up a rescue disk, so that if your computer hard drive dies, you can put in a new one, start Acronis from the  rescue disk, and copy everything to the new drive. DO NOT SKIP THIS!  It will ask you questions about which drives you  want to backup, and where you intend to back  them up to. The documentation is good, so if you  follow it you can’t go wrong. In fact, you set up  everything first, so you can see what the results  of your actions would be, and only then do you  commit and the software actually starts to do the backup. The final thing to do is to set up a backup  schedule. This is important since it is the thing  that will take the hard work out of doing the  backups. Now What? The first backup you should do is a complete  backup of your drive. This will then mean you  have a file with a name you give it on the external drive. In future, you do backups to that file, and  Acronis will do incremental backups to that file.  That is,it will only backup the things that have  changed, and add them to the file, on the  schedule you specify. We recommend every day  as the time interval. Just make sure the computer  is on, and Acronis will take care of the rest. Backing up your data is one of those things that is very boring, but necessary. As we said on the front page, it’s one of those things that you will only realise the value of when something happens to your system and you’ve lost everything. HCR Online Backup There is an alternative to doing the backup in the manner described above. Another way you can do it is to backup online. If you have a reasonable internet connection then this can be a good way to go. As you can see from the banner, you can protect all your important files by storing them on Elephant Drive’s systems. You wouldn’t want to have a copy of your entire hard drive with this system, since it would take forever to do! But you can protect your most important files using this system. One advantage is that you can then access them from anywhere in the world you happen to be. And so can people selected by you. You can select from Home or Business accounts.  Home accounts can provide up to 500GB of storage! You can cover from 1 to 5 computers, all for one low monthly fee. You have complete peace of mind. Just click the banner to get your FREE TRIAL, and see how easy it all can be.