Is There a Ghost in Your Machine? No? There Should Be!

Posted by The Mad Ape as Free Stuff, Software

We all hear and talk about how important it is to back up your data. While it is important to backup, it is far from being efficient. It is not the glorious savior of the digital world!

Backups Are Not the Answer

With my Christmas Day hard drive crash I have been working frantically. While I am glad to get a new hard drive for my computer, the process of getting all of my software and documents reinstalled has been a daunting task. Even with everything backed up it still will take the better part of two weeks to get it back to a where it was.

I have reinstalled software, documents, email, etc. Then my computer has been going through endless Microsoft updates. I have come a long way but there is still a long way to go to get my PC back in shape.

So to me this has all been time well wasted. I have better things to do and to write about, but I think this advice is important. If it saves even one person from going through the recovery process of a catastrophic hardware failure then this article will have been worth it.

BOO! There is a Ghost in my Machine…

Now that this has happened to me my first thought is that maybe I need to look at automatic ghosting. Always have a clone of my drive at the ready. The ghosting process is creating exact replicas, clones, or your hard drive(s) so you can restore them if you run into trouble.

There are multiple products available for doing just this. One that I like is DriveImage XML. First off it is 100% free and secondly it is just as powerful as one you would spend money on.

The program allows you to backup logical drives and partitions to image files, browse these images, view and extract files, restore these images to the same or a different drive, copy directly from drive to drive, schedule automatic backups with Task Scheduler. The user-friendly interface makes using this software easy.

For me this software is a must have. Set it and forget it. I do not want to go through this again. It is a pain in my blue monkey butt!

Technorati Tags: hard drive crash, back ups, DiveImage XML, ghosting hard drive, free ghosting software