How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

• By Stewart J Robinson
• 18 October, 2010
• 5 Comments

Here you’ll learn How To Back Up A Hard Disk and Copy A HardDrive to an external drive and other options on how to copy a harddrive, backup software, shadow copying, etc. Everyone knows that learning how to back up a hard disk to back up your documents and files is something we should do on a regular basis, but quite often this task gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list…

You might already have a backup system in place… but, would it fail if your office was in a fire?

And when was the last time you checked that your backup system actually works?

Here you’ll learn some options to copy a hard drive to an external drive and about hard drive backup software, shadow copying and offline synchronization.

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

Here’s a list of 12 effective options to copy a harddrive:

1. Online

Online backup is quickly becoming the most popular form of backup for individuals and small businesses. A backup program constantly monitors your document and files. Any changes to these files are copied, compressed, encrypted and then uploaded to the backup solution provider via your internet connection (see the link below to learn about hard drive backup software).

Example: http://jungledisk.com/

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

2. Local and Online

One of the draw backs to online backup is what happens when you need to recovery all your data quickly. Even with 8MB broadband connection it can take well over an hour to download one gigabyte of data. Some companies provide you with a small backup machine that takes a local backup and then uploads.

If your data is lost you can restore it from the backup box. If your server and the backup box are destroyed the service provider will send an engineer on site with a replacement box with a copy of your data that was last updated.

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

3. Backup Media

Tape technology has been around for over 50 years and is still widest used form of backup for businesses. Although the initial outlay can be expensive, tape drives still offers the quickest and cheapest way to back up large amounts of data. Currently the largest capacity tape is around 800 GB, but if you need something bigger, a tape library system can combine a series of tapes to provide a massive 80TB (80,000 GB’s) of data.

Tape backup solution also provides an easy and cheap way to archive large amounts data for legal requirements that many businesses face. A typical tape solution will start from £300 ($600) and with tapes cost anything from £5 ($10) upwards depending on the capacity.

CD/DVD media are generally quicker and cheaper than tape technology. Although the average business will backup well over 8.5 GB capacity of DVD media can currently handle. Yeah you can span data over multiple CD/DVD’s but as I will mention next week, Keep it simple.

You might want to consider DVD media for monthly archiving for a companies that utilise an online backup system. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray media is another option that offers up to 50 GB of storage, but until the technology matures I wouldn’t consider this viable backup solution just yet.

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

4. Peer to Peer, Online Backup

Another online backup solution is Peer to Peer or P2P technology. Your data are encrypted, compressed, split into many bits and then uploaded to multiple locations all over the world. You can back up as much data as you’d like, but for every megabyte you want to save you need to provide another ten megabytes of space on your local PC for other people’s backups. In principle your data is backed up ten times!

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

5. Peer to Peer, Local Backup

Instead of your data being distributed all over the internet the same concept can be applied by using spare hard drive space available on your desktop machines within your business network (see the link below to learn about hard drive backup software.

Example: http://peersoftware.com

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

6. Backup Buddies

Similar concept to P2P backup, but instead of backing up to multiple anonymous locations, you and a friend backup each others data over the internet. Again your data is secured through encryption, compressed and transferred via your broadband connection. You can have more than one backup destination which can be a local PC, another PC over the internet or you can use solution providers servers.

Example: http://crashplan.com

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

7. Portable Storage (copy a harddrive to an external harddrive)

USB hard drives and keys are one of the most common forms of backup for individuals and small businesses and one of the best solutions for how to back up a hard drive to an external drive. Most operating systems come with some type of hard drive back up software that allows you to automate the process and copy the hard drive to external hard drive (USB type).

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

8. Internal Hard-Disk

Exactly the same as the portable storage but the hard drive is inside the computer. Such a solution can often be cheaper, offer greater speeds and can configured for disk mirroring (RAID technology). In essence this is the same as if you were to copy hard drive to external hard drive, it just means your back up hard drive is not as portable as say a USB hard drive.

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

9. Network Attached Disk (NAS)

NAS drive are very similar to your USB drive with the added advantage that they don’t require USB connection to your machine. Instead, you connect them to your network and set them up as a mapped network drive on your machine. All users of the network (Linux, Mac, Windows) can place data on this storage space.

This type of storage offers small businesses an excellent backup solution. Prices start from as little £100 ($200) for 200GB capacity NAS drive.

10. Storage Area Network (SAN)

Similar system to NAS drives aimed at back up Terabytes (1000’s GB) of data for large enterprises.

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

11. Shadow Copying

Some operating systems such as Windows Vista allow you to enable a feature called Shadow Copying. The system takes snapshots of your files when changes are made to them. This allows you to roll back to a previous version of your documents and files without the need to implement the recovery process from your backup solution.

However, this process should be in addition to your backup solution, not the backup solution itself!

How To Back Up A Hard Disk or Copy A HardDrive

12. Offline Synchronization

With offline synchronization the operating system takes a complete copy of all the files available on your shared network drive. When your away from the office or your file server is unavailable you can continue to working on your documents and files. When your network drive becomes available again your files are synchronized back to the file server. Again like the shadow copying, offline synchronization should be in addition to your other backup solution.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312171

Click Here if you want to optimize your pc’s system stability and security to minimize any risk of losing your important data and having to copy a hardDrive or learn how to back-up a hard-disk.