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Home > Help & How To > 7 Simple Ways to Protect Your Computer from Danger and Disaster > Page 4
7. Keep a Spare It’s a sad fact, but sooner or later your hard drive will fail. There’s also always the chance of a virus wiping your hard drive clean or a software installation that goes awry. Of course, these things always seem to happen at the worst of times. Just like you have a spare tire on your car in case you get a flat, you have to have a spare copy of your data in case your computer dies. If you only use your computer to surf the web or check your email, you probably wouldn’t be losing a lot if your hard drive died. The best thing you could do is save all of your important documents in one folder, say My Documents, and just burn that whole folder to a CD-R every week or so. Most of us do a lot with our computers. We type papers, do our finances, work with our digital pictures, play our music, and even edit home movies. If your hard drive died, you would lose a whole lot. That’s why you have to buy a second hard drive to save your backups to. If you don’t mind opening your computer’s case, you could rather easily install an internal hard drive. The easiest thing to do is just buy an external hard drive. These drives plug into a USB or Firewire port. Some come with backup software, some don’t. If you already have a second hard drive or if you buy an external drive without software, the software to buy is Acronis True Image. Imaging software takes the entire contents of your hard drive (including operating system), compresses it, and then saves it to another drive. If your hard drive dies, just load the image onto the new drive and your computer will be exactly as how you left it when you made the image. You can also just restore individual files. I’ve been using Acronis True Image for a few years and it has worked great. It walks you through step-by-step instructions and it uses plain English you can understand. This is important when dealing with the contents of your hard drive. The newest version, 8.0, has incremental backups so it only adds files to the image that have changed since the last backup. You can also schedule it to run automatic backups. Acronis True Image 8.0 is only $50 - a great price for a program that provides so much security and peace of mind. Buy and download Acronis True Image 8.0 through RegNow for $50. To avoid disaster, you have to take the necessary steps to backup your data. Do it today or you’ll be sorry! And don’t come crawling to me with your sob story because I’d hate to say I told you so. |
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