Backing up is an important part of trucking. As a matter of fact, our overall driving skill is often judged by our proficiency in accurate backing. But getting a 53' trailer backed around a beautiful fence, two environmentally protected trees, one poorly planned pole, two other trucks, and squarely into a dock door has nothing to do with the type of backing up I'm talking about here. No, I'm about to discuss the importance of backing up your Operating System, program applications, and data. Please, don't tune me out; this is important stuff and I'll be brief. Well, as brief as I ever get.
An interesting study regarding the frequency of hard disk drive failures was recently released by Google and it's caused a good deal of concern among folks whose computers never venture from their cubicle. You, my friends, you who lug laptops from border to border and sea to shining sea, should be highly concerned. If hard drives resting comfortably in cubicles are failing at much higher rates than expected than you can bet that hard drives being bounced down the highway have an even shorter life expectancy.
Now, a hard disk drive is a relatively inexpensive piece of hardware but the total cost of replacing one that fails unexpectedly can be quite high; not to mention time consuming. That's because, unless you're performing full backups, a sudden hard drive failure means you're going to have to reinstall and reconfigure your Operating System and all the applications you had on the failed drive. Further, if you haven't performed any backups, you will have forever lost all the data stored on your drive.
I'm sure that nearly all of you have an Operating System re-installation disk, and you probably have the installation CDs for some or even all of your program applications, but you might not be carrying them around with you in the truck and, even if you are; what about all the programs you've downloaded? And what about all your files and data? I know I wouldn't want to lose the several hundred music files I've bought at a buck a pop and I'm sure you wouldn't either. If you've recently completed a full backup, though, you can recover from something as simple as a software glitch to something as catastrophic as a complete hard drive failure; with minimal cost and effort.
There are two components to a backup system: software and storage. Let's take a look, first, at the software.
Acronis True Image 10.0 Home
Obviously, Acronis True Image 10.0 Home isn't the only available backup software but, because it was recommended by people way smarter than me, it's what I'm recommending to you. I'm also recommending it because its quite possibly the most powerful and user-friendly backup and restoration program available. (I'm hoping, because its easy to use, that it will be used!) Acronis True Image 10.0 employs easy to use wizards that walk you, step-by-step, through the backup process; you can choose to create an image of your entire hard disk drive, including the Operating System and program applications, or you can backup individual files and folders within predefined categories like music, videos, photos, e-mail, etc. Imaging makes doing a "bare metal" restoration, after replacing a failed hard drive, extremely quick and easy because you won't have to reinstall the Operating System or program applications and all your files and folders are intact.
Another key feature of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home is the automatic management of archives, which are stored in folders with special properties called backup locations. When you begin a backup operation the backup locations are checked and, if any space limitation is exceeded, the oldest backups will be consolidated or deleted.
I was fully intending to write up an Acronis True Image 10.0 Home tutorial for publication within the pages of theCyberTruckStop.com but Acronis has included this review and tutorial , originally published by Barry's Rigs 'n Reviews, on their web site. I can't see any way to improve on it so I won't waste my time; I'll just point you in the right direction. Pay close attention to the section regarding the creation and use of "Bootable Rescue Media". This "will allow you to start Acronis True Image and recover your system from an Acronis True Image backup if you can't boot into Windows. If you bought and installed the boxed, version, you can boot Acronis True Image directly from the CD."
Bottom line; you can find cheaper, even free, backup applications but True Image 10.0 is feature-filled and makes creating backups easier than ever. What’s more, it can save your bacon. Acronis True Image 10.0 Home is an excellent value and highly recommended.
Storage
The Acronis True Image 10.0 backup software supports a wide array of backup storage media but, because I'm focusing on the idea of doing a full system backup for recovery from a hard drive failure, and because we need a portable solution, I've settled on the Toshiba 100GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive as the perfect portable backup solution. (It's also available in 120GB and 160GB versions.) At 5.6-inches long by 3.5-inches wide and less than one inch tall the drive will fit easily into any laptop bag and the new external hard drive incorporates Toshiba’s patent-pending shock mounting and ventilation system for a trouble-free mobile storage solution.
The Toshiba external drive comes bundled with the award-winning NTI Shadow™ software, which runs in the background, capturing updates to files and automatically saving them to the external drive, but you're still well advised to do full and complete system backups using the Acronis True Image 10.0 application. Remember, if your laptop hard drive fails, you're going to need to replace more than files and folders.
By the way, just in case you want to upgrade your laptop hard drive, you can kill two birds with one stone. The article I just linked to, so skillfully written by yours truly, discusses performing a hard drive upgrade using the Apricorn Universal EZ Hard Disk Drive Upgrade Kit. One of the biggest advantages to using the Apricorn kit is that you can then use your old laptop hard drive, in the Apricorn Hard Drive Enclosure, as an external hard drive. That way you've got a shiny new hard drive running in your laptop and an external drive to use for performing backups.
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