The Jakarta Post (Indonesia)

January 22, 2007

Original article on The Jakarta Post web site

Data backup, disk imaging getting simpler

How valuable is the content of your hard disk? Have you ever given it a thought?

Some people may have their hard disk filled to the bream with digital garbage, including illicit material. Others may have tons of MP3 files ripped from borrowed CDs, movies copied from DVDs or downloaded from the Internet. Teenagers may have hundreds of pirated games already installed on their system.

With the number of people using digital cameras today fast exceeding those who still stick to their conventional, film-based SLRs, hard disks — the main data storage device inside our computers — have become their family albums.

My daughter keeps a lot of unfinished blogs on her hard disk. I keep a database of names and contact numbers on mine. I also keep copies of my articles and case studies. There are also whitepapers and manuals, annual reports, etc., that I have collected from various sources over the years.

Those small-medium business owners who work from home may also have other important stuff on the continuously spinning platters inside their hard disk. They may keep their financial and accounting data on their computers. They may have their copies of their price lists, quotations and invoices in addition to their database of clients on the same hard disk.

Archives of email correspondence can be very critical in resolving a dispute in the future, so they must also be kept for many years, perhaps much longer than the life of the hard disks themselves.

Whatever the content of the hard disk, the last thing we want is to lose it all because we did not make a backup copy.

It is true that hard disk technologies have improved a lot. We can expect them to last at least three to four years, as long as we keep them cool and clean.

Still, there is no guarantee that this is the rule.

At any time, a virus may be able to pass through the anti-virus protection that we have installed and wipe out our precious data completely.

Or, a manufacturing imperfection may shorten the life of the hard disk. Remember, hard disk makers can only tell us the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), which is nothing more than a bloated statistic.

So the more valuable the content of our hard disks, the more urgent to back them up.

We have plenty of options. If you have a network at home, you can use one of those Network Attached Storage (NAS) products like Synology's DiskStation. A NAS — which is also hard disk-based — is usually somewhat costly but it can be used to store backup files from other computers on the same network.

We also have external hard disk products from Maxtor and Western Digital, two of the few remaining hard disk makers in the world.

In fact, we can build our own external hard disks. What we need is a hard disk and its external enclosure. If you enjoy building your own systems, choose enclosures with features that help ensure data integrity, though. There is no need to spend time backing up your data only to get garbage after the restore process.

Now, how do you back up your data? Do you still open your Windows Explorer and drag and drop files to the backup storage device? That does not sound like you are in the 21st century.

Today, there are more than a dozen backup software products that will handle the backup process for us automatically according to a schedule that we set.

Recently, courtesy of Acronis Singapore, I had the opportunity to test drive its Acronis True Image 10 Home.

Although it is geared toward home users, Acronis True Image 10 Home surprisingly packs a lot of tools that even power users will find very exciting. That is not to say that the tools are difficult to use — Acronis has cleverly incorporated Wizards into the tools to ensure ease of use.

Acronis True Image can back up files not only onto a hard disk but also on various other storage devices including the old Zip and Jaz drives, CD-R(W), DVD+R(W) and DVD-RAM. It also works with different hard disk interfaces including SATA, IDE, SCSI, Firewire (IEEE 1394), USB 1.0 and USB 2.0.

Acronis True Image is capable of several different backup processes beyond copying files. It can clone the whole partition or hard disk to another partition or hard disk, complete with all files and folders.

If the source partition is bootable, the clone will be portable as well. So if you want to replace your hard disk with a new and larger one, just clone it and then make the new hard disk the bootable primary master. You will not have to install the operating system and applications, enter the CD-Key for each and activate them.

If you refresh your system — that is, reformat the entire hard disk and reinstall the other application software — once a year to keep it at top performance level, you can create an image on a CD-R or DVD-R. The CD-ROM or DVD-ROM can be bootable, as well. After the image is restored to the hard disk, your computer will run as fast as new.

Outlook is an important repository of information and archives. Outlook contains the email addresses of people with whom we have corresponded. If something happened to the Outlook data or contact file, we can be in a lot of trouble.

I know this, unfortunately, through first-hand experience. I lost contact with many old friends because the only place I kept their email addresses was in my Outlook, and it got corrupted.

Acronis True Image shines on the backup side, too. It can backup to an FTP site, so our backup files can be stored on a server in a different building. We can select the files and folders to back up, so that we can keep our backup storage size to a minimum. The software can also back up Outlook's contacts and to-do lists in addition to received and sent emails.

With such comprehensive data backup and disk-imaging tools thrown in, Acronis True Image is a highly recommended product. It is also Windows Vista-ready, and it supports 64-bit environment as well.

Acronis True Image is not the only PC and data backup software out there, of course. In the area of disk imaging, its close competitor is the very popular Norton Ghost from Symantec. These drive-imaging tools can be extremely useful in environments such as Internet cafes. It can save many hours — even days — each time a customer wreaks havoc on a hard disk.

For those interested, you can download a 15-day trial copy from www.acronis.com for evaluation purposes.