Are you protected if your hard drive crashes today?
Let's face it, although there are a lot
of proactive people in the world, most people don't get serious about backing up
their computers until they have experienced the loss of their work. The pain of
losing months (or years) of hard work can be devastating.
Of course, for your networks and your servers, you have RAID 5 striped sets
with parity keeping your data safe. This e-zine is devoted to your desktop
computers; there is a new personal backup tool on the block that is very
impressive.
Recently, Symantec released the new GHOST version 9 that is nothing short of
amazing. Apparently drawing heavily on the recently purchased Drive Image from
PowerQuest, this new version of GHOST is impressive.
The setup
About a week ago, I installed Symantec
GHOST version 9 on my primary computer and was amazed that it backed up 20
Gigabytes in less than 20 minutes to the laptop's external Iomega hard drive.
That is fast!
The best part is that you never had to exit Windows XP in order to perform
the backup (older versions of GHOST would restart the computer in system mode to
perform the backup process). So fast and simple - this is the way backups need
to be so everyone is willing to invest the time in performing daily backups.
System crash!
A couple days later, I was testing a new program on my computer that errantly
scrambled the registry in Windows and led to a complete loss of access to all
files on the hard drive. As always, I had made a full backup the night before,
only this was to be the first time to restore (other than testing) with Symantec
GHOST version 9.
I connected the external Hard drive, rebooted the computer using the GHOST
CD, and about 20 minutes later the laptop was back to the exact point it was the
night before. Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I went out to the local CompUSA and bought 3 more copies
of GHOST 9 to replace the older versions of GHOST on the other computers in the
office.
How to protect yourself
BE SURE you are backing up every day you store any useful information on your
computer (and that includes receiving and/or replying to important e-mail). To
accomplish that, there are three things you need to do:
First, you need a device for GHOST to store the backup on. I choose to use
the IomegaŽ External Hard
Drive models that connect to external USB v2.0 ports.
Second, get a copy of Symantec
GHOST version 9. I recommend buying a "boxed" copy (instead of the download)
so that you get the CD. The CD is important so that you can
"boot" your computer in the event the hard drive is corrupted to a point that
the operating system cannot boot.
Third, test the installation by saving a test file, performing a backup,
deleting the test file, and then performing a restore to see if your test file
comes back again. Remember, it is up to YOU to be testing your backups regularly
to ensure they are working properly.
As always, I encourage you to have your local "computer expert" handy in case
you run into trouble, and it is up to you how involved you want them to be in
the process.
If you have more than one computer that you want to back up, then purchase a
copy of GHOST for each machine. If you buy a large enough external hard drive,
you could potentially use the same external drive to backup all of your
computers, however your life will be simpler if you have a drive for each
computer. Remember - the easier it is for you to perform daily backups, the more
likely you are to do them regularly.
