Here’s a quote from Dave Brooks, an A+ certified professional computer technician, and a popular guest writer here on Tech Thoughts:
“You don’t need to know how a PC works to use it, just like your car, if you have problems you visit a mechanic, you don’t need to know how it does what it does.
One thing you DO need to know is – you MUST back up your computer if you have anything of even remote value to you on it.”
Dave Brooks knows what he’s talking about. After fifteen years in the industry, Dave knows, that at some point, your computer will suffer system, or hardware failure.
What are you going to do then – if you don’t have a current backup of your critical data, system/device drivers (something many of us forget), and user operating system settings?
How are you going to recover your irreplaceable data; documents, digital photos, email messages, personal and business related work, and important private data?
So backups are important – critically important. Despite the critical importance of Hard Drive backups, most computer technicians (including Dave), will tell you; typically, computer users’ do not backup their irreplaceable data.
If you should suffer catastrophic Hard Drive failure and you are one of the few, out of the ordinary, computer users who regularly and faithfully backup, you will have work ahead of you, but you will recover. But without a plan, your data becomes a hostage to fortune. Your Hard Drive might be damaged by malware – it might not. Your Hard Drive might fail – it might not. But why take the risk?
If you don’t yet have a backup plan, it’s time you thought seriously about developing one. Make developing and implementing a backup strategy, a New Years resolution you intend to keep.
The effort involved in learning how to protect your data, by developing and implementing a backup plan in today’s computing age, is minimal. Much easier than it was, even as little as two or three years ago.
The best backup strategy includes imaging your Hard Drives and partitions, since that allows you to restore your important data, your complete operating system, as well as your installed applications, user settings, etc.
There are loads of free applications out in the wild blue that, used properly and regularly, will speed to the rescue. One of the best free program, that I have no difficulty recommending, is EASEUS Todo Backup.
This is a brilliant application that will allow you to backup, recover your backups, image your Hard Drives, clone your Hard Drives, and a host of additional features. All of this, in a “follow the bouncing ball” simple, user interface. If there’s an easier way to backup critical data, I have yet to find it.
The application requires installation of driver software so just say “yes”. Following installation, a restart is required.
The user interface has been designed so that a user with minimum computing experience, should have no difficulty.
The following screen captures illustrate the simple process of backing up a particular folder.
In this case, I choose the task name, selected the folder to be backed up, selected the backup media/location, and ….. Done!
Recovery, is point and click simple.
Additional functions and features are available under the “Tools” menu.
Fast facts:
Backup Management – By Managing backup tasks and plans, you can change a backup task or plan and execute the changes immediately, delete image files, and even convert a disk image.
Mount and Unmount – Mount a disk and partition image to a virtual partition (working as ordinary, logical drives) to explore or copy files in it.
Image Splitting – Split an image file into several files of specified size to fit different storage devices. This feature is helpful to burn the backup file to CD/DVD.
Image Compression – Compress a backup image to save disk space. The higher compression level, the smaller image is.
Check Image – Check the integrate of backup image. You can validate whether you will be able to recover from the backup image.
Disaster Recovery – Restore important files from backed up image and perform disaster recovery just by simple clicks. It ensures quick recovery from system crash, a personal error, hardware or software failure, virus attack or hacker’s intrusive destruction, etc.
Disk and Partition Clone – Migrate or copy all the data on a hard disk or partition to another.
Wipe Data – With this feature, you can erase all the sensitive data on a disk or partition to protect your privacy.
Bootable Media – Run EASEUS Todo Backup from an emergency disk to perform recovery in case of system crash, etc. USB drive, CD or DVD Bootable media can be created.
System requirements: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Win 7 (32 and 64 bit).
Download at: EASEUS
If you’re looking for a free application to handle all of your backup needs, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in EASEUS Todo Backup. Give it a try.
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Bill,
Nice find… I’ll have to play around with this to see how it compares with Macrium Reflect. Easeus appears to have put together a package that covers several backup strategies.
Rick
Hey Rick,
Free – Easy. A hard to beat combo.
Thanks for dropping in.
Bill
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Hi Bill,
Backing up my PC is easy as it is always connected to an external drive and backups are done automatically using Paragon Backup and restore. The laptop, however, requires discipline (not a major strength for me), so anything that makes the job easier has to be worth a try.
Thanks for recommending this.
Kind regards
John
Dave/Bill,
Great pick for a drop dead simple solution for backup. I use to pay for Acronis to do basically the same thing.
Regards
Mark
Hey mark,
It’s hard to go wrong with this application. It sure takes away the “it’s too hard to backup” argument. What could be simpler than “point and click?”.
Best,
Bill
Sir,
Thanks for this post, any chance of testing Easeus Todo backup 2.0 Beta.It has some advanced features I guess and for download link, you have err contact them.
Regards
Hey Try,
Thank you for the tip – I’ll check this out.
Bill
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