Avoid Disaster When Your Hard Drive Fails

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There are lots of products out there that will back up your data files. Only a few can backup your operating system files and boot partition as well. Yet these are the things you’ll need to restore if your hard drive fails or becomes corrupted and won’t boot.

Basic backup software programs simply backup files or groups of files. To be able to restore your entire drive, you need a backup software that provides both image and file backup.

No one really expects a disk crash but drive failures do happen—and often at the most inconvenient times.  In addition to the possible loss of important data files, a disk crash can leave you with the daunting task of having to replace the dead drive and reinstall your operating system and all of your applications. While you’re doing this—assuming you know how to do this, your computer is accomplishing nothing and, in many cases, so are you.

While this “rebuilding” time can range from mildly irritating to extremely distressing for a home computer user, it can bring a computer-dependent small business, or even a large office, to a virtual standstill.  Whatever you use your computer for, having a quick and easy-to-restore backup can eliminate both the distress and the expense of the prolonged downtime normally associated with a hard drive failure.

When you’re restoring from a drive failure, the best kind of backup to have is an image backup.  Most backup software products are designed to provide a way to backup and restore individual files.  A backup software application like EzBackup from Data Protection Solutions by Arco, makes it possible to backup your entire drive.  A complete drive backup is called an image backup or image copy.  This is useful because you can make an exact image copy of your drive and then supplement this with regular (daily, weekly, etc.) file backups.  This is useful because, while some files on your hard drive change frequently, many files hardly ever change and need to be updated only rarely if ever at all.It even works in the background so you will never have down time.

An image copy is a drive to drive copy. In order to create an image copy you must have a second drive to backup or copy to. This can be a second internal drive but it is probably best to use an external drive, such as a USB or FireWire drive as your backup drive.  The nice thing about an external backup drive is its portability.  You can easily carry it home or lock it up each night.  You can remove it and take it with you in case of an imminent disaster, such as a hurricane or flood.  The one essential feature of your backup drive is that it must be as large as or larger than your source drive. Your source drive is usually your internal C:\ drive but it could be any drive you want to backup.

An important issue to consider when transferring an image copy to your backup drive is whether the data will be compressed or encrypted.  While compression and encryption are useful tools, they can introduce the possibility of data corruption and this danger is magnified when dealing with such a large data transfer.  There are, unfortunately, a great many reported cases of users who, like my friend Sharon, realized too late that their “backups” were nothing more than empty folders or that their backup data was corrupted beyond repair.  When choosing any backup software, but particularly an image backup software, be sure that there is a way to verify the contents of the backup to ensure that your backup files contain good, usable, restorable data.

Restoring from an image backup eliminates all the work and time normally associated with rebuilding a new drive.  When you restore the image backup to your new drive, not only all of your data files but all of your applications, your preferences, your latest hardware drivers and even your drive partitions are all transferred to your new drive.  If you are restoring a boot drive image, the new drive will be bootable as well.  The actual time involved in transferring the data to the new drive will depend on the size and speed of the drives.

The only other issue to consider when restoring an image backup is the drive partition size.  When you transfer an image of one drive to another, the drive receiving the image will create a partition to contain it.  This drive partition will be exactly the size of the old drive.  If, for example, you make an image copy of a 120 GB drive on a 200 GB drive, the 200 GB drive will contain a 120 GB active partition and 80 GB of unusable space.  If you wish to gain access to the unused 80 GB, you will need to expand the 120 GB partition.  This will require a partition expansion utility.  Some backup and drive copy software programs include a partition expansion utility. 

How do you know if you really need an image backup?  Consider how much you value your data, how much time (and money, if you have to pay someone else  to do it) it will take to rebuild a new drive if yours fails and how inconvenienced you will be until your computer is up and running again.  With external backup drives becoming increasingly affordable, even home computer users can now enjoy the security that drive to drive backup software can provide.

Download EzBackup software and try it free for 30 days.

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Transfer your data to a larger hard drive

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If you’re facing the challenge of moving to a new or larger drive, you’ll be glad to know you don’t have to go it alone. Hard drive migration software can turn this irritating and time consuming chore into a quick and easy job.If you want to create a bootable drive that contains working applications, you cannot simply copy your files and folders from your old drive to the new drive. You need to either individually install each application or migrate the data on the old drive to the new one using drive migration software, such as EzMigration. Migration software is designed to transfer, or migrate, your data from your old drive to your new one all together. Migration software doesn’t copy your files and folders one by one. It creates a drive image, or image copy, of your existing drive that contains everything on the drive. Then it transfers this exact image copy as a whole to the new or larger drive for you.

The image copy created by your migration software is essentially a clone of your original drive. It contains everything on your original drive, including any drive partitions. When you clone a drive in this way, you won’t have to re-install your applications or any information you may have added, such as application or system preferences or the arrangement of your desktop. They will be exactly as they were. Your migration software will even migrate the boot partition (and any other partitions) from your old drive so your new drive will be bootable. Your new clone drive will even include all of the software updates and the hardware driver updates that you have installed over time on your computer.EzMigration drive migration software eliminates the hassle normally associated with moving to a new or larger drive because it makes the drive migration process so simple. EzMigration runs under all versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista and makes copying a drive a simple drag and drop operation. So you can skip the many hours it normally takes to rebuild a drive and the days or weeks it can take until you get all your applications re-installed and running just the way you like them again. With EzMigration, all it takes is a few quick mouse clicks and you’re done.

In addition to copying your drive, EzMigration is also designed to simplify any needed partition expansion. When migration software transfers a drive image to a new drive, it creates a partition the size of the old drive on the new one. For example, if you migrate from a 40 GB drive to a 120 GB drive, you will end up with a 120 GB hard drive that contains a 40GB usable partition and 80 GB of unusable space. EzMigration makes it easy to expand that 40 GB partition into the unallocated 80 GB of unused space and gain access to all 120 GB of space on the new drive.

Visit Data Protection Solutions by Arco to download a trial of EzMigration today. See how easy it can be to migrate your drive

 Watch this Demo Video and see how easily you can transfer your data to a larger drive.

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What is image backup?

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An image backup or image copy is like a picture, or mirror image, of your entire drive. It is an exact bit by bit copy of your drive. A drive image is, in essence, a drive clone. The result of an image backup or image copy is quite different from what you get when you do a file by file data backup or file by file drive copy. Unlike a simple data backup or copy, an image backup also copies any partitions and system information that may be on your drive.

 

The only requirement for creating an image backup or image copy is that your destination or backup drive must be as large or larger than your source drive. Obviously, you cannot transfer a drive image of a 120 GB drive onto an 80 GB drive. It’s okay if your backup drive is larger than your source drive. After creating the image copy of your drive, you will need to do regular periodic backups of your indidivual files in order to keep your backup up to date.

The drive image EzBackup Software or EzMigration Software creates on your backup drive or destination drive has everything that’s on your source drive–even drive partitions (if your source drive has been partitioned). It includes your operating system, preferences, applications, and all of your data files as well as any application and/or driver updates you may have installed over time.

If your hard drive should fail or your operating system should become corrupted so that you can no longer get your source drive to boot, you can use the image backup EzBackup has created to restore your source drive to a working state or to transfer your drive information to a new replacement drive. The EzBackup image restore process is very simple and, when it is complete, you will have all of your information restored to your corrupted or replacement drive and the drive will boot up and operate just as it did before your problem or drive failure occurred.

The image backup eliminates the need to reinstall your operating system or applications or to search for and download all of your application and device driver updates. Everything that was there before will be there again. What differentiates EzBackup from other backup software that claim to provide an image is that the data within the EzBackup drive image is not compressed or encrypted. That means that your backup data remains untouched and unchanged by the software. It also means that there is no chance that you will find your backup data corrupted or unusable when you need to restore it as can happen when compression or encryption techniques are employed.

Once EzBackup has created your image backup, you can schedule file and/or folder backups. Just tell EzBackup which files to backup and when you want backups to take place. EzBackup offers you the option to overwrite (or add to) the existing files in the image backup or to maintain multiple separate backups with dated restore points.

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