Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Hard Drive to Computer Perfection

"There are two kinds of computer users: those that back up and those who haven't lost any data...yet."

- Me.

I mention this as the 500Gb Seagate hard drive on my home office desktop crashed two weeks ago. Fortunately I back up my data periodically to one of three USB external hard drives that I have, so I didn't lose any data, well, not much data. I apparently forgot to include the right Adobe Photoshop Elements catalog in the backup.

Oops.

Oh well, the old one wasn't working that well anyway.

But the downside was that it still took close to 3 days to reinstall Windows Vista and 20 some programs that I use and their corresponding data.

This indicated to me that my backup process was not that good and that a disc image would probably be a better option. I know a number of disk image programs exist so a future article will deal with some of the options such as free and for-a-fee Macrium Reflect, Paragon or Acronis True Image as well as my trials.