One solution is to have more than one backup disk. The more disks you have, the better protected you’ll be. With portable disk drives so cheap and easily available, it’s possible to have one backup disk for every day of the week. Label them up with that days Monday through to Sunday, and do a full backup onto each of them. After that, you can do an incremental backup each day, and you’ll effectively have seven backups of your hard-drive. So if one backup fails, you have six more to rely on. The chances of even two of your backups failing are remote, let alone seven. In fact, the odds of that happening are astronomical.

However, have you considered what would happen if your house were broken into or you suffer some kind of damage such as a fire? In these situations you could easily lose your computer and all your backups at the same time. In many cases, the data you own is much more valuable than the hardware, so you should make a plan to keep the data safe at all times. The best way to do this is to have a copy of your data offsite. If you work in an office, you could consider taking a backup disk to work with you. A simple rotation system would mean that you have a copy of your most recent data kept in your desk draw at work. You take a new disk with you one day, and bring home the old one. The chances of both your home and your office burning down or being broken into at the same time is just as remote as all your backups being damages. In addition, you’ll usually have a disk with you in transit, so at any one time you’ll actually have your data in three different places.

Other options include backing up your data to an online service. This can be just as costly as buying disks, and depending on the amount of data could take a very long time to upload and download, especially if you have movie files you want to protect.

You’ll also want to consider using encryption on your disks if you’re leaving personal data on your backups, especially in an unattended office overnight. There are many free programs such as Truecrypt that you can use to encrypt your data backups on the fly, to automatically protect your data.

First, a quick review of creating a hard drive partition is demonstrated. To begin, go to Start > Right-click Computer > Manage. Or, enter computer into the run and search box and select Computer Management from the available options.

Click on Storage > Disk Management. Choose the drive that you want to partition. In this example, there is only one hard drive to choose. It is a 1TB hard drive with an NTFS files system and plenty of space to allow for a significant partition if necessary.

Here, the amount of shrink space entered is 100,000 MB, or 100 GB. This is a decent size for a VHD and it can be altered in the future. Click Shrink when done.

Select this unallocated space and right-click and choose New Simple Volume. The setup Wizard will appear. Follow the steps and fill in the partition size. You should see the VHD listed when you double-click Computer. In this example, it is named “Archive”.

Now that the VHD image has been created and named, the next step is to choose the data to backup. You may drag and drop as many files as the space will allow. With a partition of this size, a large amount of data can be stored over time. The computer used in this example shares data with other PCs on a remote network. Using Windows 7 Backup and Restore, you can backup all data on the PC easily and save yourself the trouble of dragging and dropping.

Backup to Virtual Hard Drive

To use the new VHD for a complete Backup and Restore, follow these steps:

Open the Control Panel and choose System and Security. Click “Back up your computer”. You will then see this option:

Select Options in the Check backup settings then click Change Backup Settings and you will see this window representing all drives. Select the new VHD as the backup Volume by clicking on it and then click Next.

Notice that Windows 7 warns that this drive is on the physical disk as your system drive. This warning is there because this is not the ideal space for a final backup. It is rather easy to transfer the data from the VHD to an external hard drive at a later time as often as needed.

To select specific documents, rather than a full backup, highlight “Let me choose”. To allow a full backup, highlight “Let Windows choose”.

You can set a schedule for the backup to occur at regular intervals but always be sure to make a final backup on an external hard drive. On a network this is particularly useful. You can, for example, backup a shared network folder on a weekly basis and ensure that shared network files are continually backed up. Set it any way you like.

A registration is required which requires entering a name and valid email address. A verification email is send to the mail account. That link leads to a website containing the download link of East-Tec Backup 2009 and the registration code to register the software program.

The backup software program offers four modules in the main interface: Backup, Restore, Tasks and Sync.

New backup jobs are created in this module. One of the interesting – and user friendly – features of East-Tec Backup 2009 are presets that are available. Presets can be used to backup specific, and usually important, files and data. It is for example possible to backup the mail accounts (recognized the email clients Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook and Opera on the test system), Registry keys or user settings from programs such as Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Winamp, Windows Media Player, various web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera but not Google Chrome), Putty and dozens more. It is of course also possible to select files or folders from the computer system.

The data can be backed up to local folders, external hard drives, local area network folders, removable disks, CD, DVD or remote locations using the ftp protocol. The usual set of options are available to use compression and encryption to ensure data safety and integrity. Several backup types can be selected ranging from incremental backups over differential backups to stack backups. Backups can be scheduled and warnings configured.

It is furthermore possible to run programs before and after the task starts and to verify the backup after it has been completed. Another great option is to place backup jobs into groups which can be executed sequentially then.

Backups that have been created can be restored completely. It is also possible to only restore specific files or folders which is obviously great if you only need access to some files or folders of the entire backup.

The Sync option makes it possible to synchronize files and folders between two computers or devices like a local computer and server, desktop computer and laptop or a local computer and a network location.

The interface of the backup software is user friendly, tasks are easy to create. Users who are currently looking for a backup software should take a closer look and download East-Tec Backup 2009 for a test run. It might be exactly what they are looking for.

Update: The offer is over, the page where you could get the free copy of the backup software is no longer available.

So what is the Drive Backup Express offering in detail? It obviously allows the user to backup to hard drive or partition if it is currently accessible in Windows XP or Windows Vista. The Drive Backup version only supports backing the data up on other drives that are connected to the computer but that should be enough for most users anyway.

The archive that is created during backup is compressed, it used roughly 17 Gigabytes to backup my 50-something Gigabyte hard drive. On the other hand that drive had a lot of free space, only 19.2 Gigabyte were filled with data.

The images that get backed up by Drive Backup Express can be restored which means it’s possible to backup partitions or complete drives. Resizing is supported as well.

That’s basically the functionality of Paragon Drive Backup Express. The commercial Drive Backup software supports several interesting additional features like incremental backups, backup encryption, backup on CD / DVD and file restoration.

It really does not matter if you have a root server or just a shared account because those normally have Gigabytes of storage as well, mostly unused. Ghacks for instance uses less than 200 Megabytes of storage space plus less than 100 Megabytes for the database.

I will not explain how to setup an ftp account in this article. If someone would like to know let me know and I could write another article about it. Remember that ftp accounts can also be created on Windows computers using programs like Filezilla Server for instance which means that you could transfer backups between accounts as well.

Please download Cobian Backup and install the software. Start it after installation, you will be greeted with the following screen.

We have to create at least one task for our backup. Press CTRL A to bring up the new task dialog window. The left pane contains several menus that contain settings that we have to configure (once). We select the type of backup, the files that we want to backup, the destination for the backup and so on.

The most important setting in the general pane is the type of backup setting. Do we want to create full backups which means that all files will be uploaded to the ftp, an incremental backup which backups only the changed files since the last backup or a differential backup which would only backup files changed from the last full backup. For our purpose we select full backup.

The files menu deals with the files that we want to backup and the destination for the backup. It is possible to drag and drop files and folders that we want to backup or select them by clicking on the add button. I would not suggest to backup a full hard drive though. The My Documents folder for instance could be a folder to add there, or part of if at least.

It depends on the files that you want to backup, the choice is yours. Just make sure you do not add Gigabytes of files if it is not absolutely necessary because those files have to be uploaded to ftp afterwards using your upload bandwidth and if you are not a lucky one using a symmetrical line with lots of bandwidth you might create a process that would last several days before it completes.

Select Add Ftp Site as the destination which should open a new window where you can enter the login details for the ftp site. Enter the IP, username, password and working directory. Note that there are submenus on the left, those can be used to configure the transfer in details.

You can add TSL (Transport Level Security), a proxy, SSL, IPv6 extensions and much more. The four settings under Connection are the only ones that are required, all others are optional. A click on the test button tests the ftp connection, it displays errors in red. The message All tests passed should appear if everything went well.

The Schedule menu configures when you want to run the backups. Options include Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly plus Once, Manually and Timer. The default setting is daily. I set it to weekly which is sufficient for the kind of data that I want to backup.

The Archive menu configures if you want to compress the files before uploading them to ftp. This is a good idea normally because it will reduce the file size and you will be left with just a few zip files in the ftp directory and not hundreds of files.

Select Zip compression and choose to split the files. I did choose 100 Megabyte zips.

The Special, Events and Advanced menus are not needed to create the backups. They let you exclude files from being backed up or let you include only certain file types for instance.

Events can be configured to happen before and after backups, e.g. executing a file, closing a program or restarting or shutting down the computer.

The last menu is called Advanced. It makes it possible to run the backup as another user. The newly created task should appear in the left pane of the main menu afterwards. If you have scheduled backups they should be automatically started when the date and time is reached. It is possible to manually start a backup as well.

Some closing thoughts. I did not think of it at the beginning of the article but it is also possible to backup the files to a gaming console like the Xbox. My modded Xbox has ftp build in and enough hard drive space to store the backups. The benefit would be that I would not have to upload the backup on a ftp server on the Internet but on my home network which would mean that transfers would be much faster.

Drive Image XML is able to backup logical drives and partitions to image files, browse the created images and restore files from them, restore images of course and make direct drive to drive copies. It is possible to schedule tasks with the windows task scheduler, drive image walks you through those steps as well.

It is able to create images from drives that are currently in use – I would not advise to backup a drive or partition while you are working on it though. You will be able to restore drives without rebooting which is a nice feature. Last but not least it works with Fat 12, 16, 32 and NTFS file systems and can be run from a WinPE boot disk.