Back Up Your Computer

Do you back up your computer regularly or at all? Yesterday I was searching Google and clicking on search results when all of the sudden my computer went haywire! Microsoft Home anti-virus popped up telling me I had a virus. Well I don’t have Microsoft Home anti-virus so I really did have a virus. A few minutes later my Norton Anti-Virus popped up telling me it had deleted a virus but it was too late my computer was infected with what I later learned was the Trojan.Agent/Gen-Frauder virus. There are ways to clean the clean the computer but that takes a lot of research and a lot of work along with a lot of computer knowledge. Luckily I had made a backup of my computer the night before. I just took out my rescue CD and 30 minutes later my computer was back to normal.

Over the years I have had many hard drive failures as well and have always been saved by my backups. It’s not hard or expensive. There are many ways to backup. My recommendation is to use Acronis True Image Home software along with a USB drive.

Get an external USB hard drive to save your backups to. I recommend you purchase a backup drive that holds at least twice as much data as you have on your computer. That way you can have at least two complete backups of your system.

The Acronis True Image software will make an exact image of your hard drive(s). I recommend doing a full backup every time vs. doing incremental backups. Full backups are much easier to work with. A simple wizard will walk you through making a backup. Once you have a backup you can easily restore a single file (something that was accidentally deleted) or your complete drive in the case of a virus or failure.

Even if you don’t feel that you have any important data on your computer do you really want to re-install your operating system and all your applications from scratch? Do you even know where all your install disks are? Not to mention all the updates you will have to download. If you don’t backup now is the time to start.