Backing up your pc's

[Wendy]

As a programmer I know that backing up data from my different pc's is a lifesaving procedure and it saves me from future disaster and stress. The question often asked is, will my harddisk crash or not, it will one day or another.

Few days ago I evaluated and bought a program Acronis True Image Home 2010. This software makes a copy of you harddisk and in case of harddisk failure you can restore the disk exactly as it was before and the best part you can do this in minutes starting from a bootable cd that is created by the software. I've tested it on several test pc's and was able to restore them exactly as before.

As an extra bonus you can extract one or more files from the harddisk image and restore only these.

As most of us, simbuilders, have a lot of pc's to maintain and you have to experiment sometimes with these pc's I think this program can be of interest. There is also a virtual feature where you can test new settings without applying this to your real pc. If everything goes well you can make the changes permanent. I haven't tested this one yet.


The best thing is the price, it's only 50 euro.


Regards, Wendy

[oal331]

Thank you Wendy for your post and sharing with us.
I don't have Acronis yet, but i know from a friend, that it is very simple and safe.
He's always telling me to make backup my cockpit pcs with acronis!!
Maybe the time has come to do it.

[litebkt]

I also use Acronis. But I have learned a hard lesson. I had assumed that when I did a complete backup through the user interface that I could restsore my complete system..... nope. I had to rebuild a couple of computers last year because I did my "complete backups" from within Windows.

What you have to do is a complete backup by booting from an Acronis startup disk before Windows starts. This way, you get your complete operating system in tact. This is critical.

Acronis does a good job at backing up your data from within the operating system and it will back up a great number of the operating system files.

You should back up your personal data often. I have a 2TB Western Digital USB drive that came with backup software and it cosntantly monitors my personal data and backs it up. Whenever I make a change to the OS or install a new piece of software, I back it up from the Acronis start up disk.

Michelle