I recently experienced the nightmare of having a virus destroying my system files and after hours of efforts the only option I had left was to reformat my laptop and reinstall Windows XP Home. This turned out to be a disasterous solution. I lost my valuable data not to mention hours spent in reinstalling every program.
For future guarding measures, I want to buy a backup software that would restore everything that I had on my laptop/PC in a situation like this. I’m looking for some software that allows you to restore from an image of your hard disk and requires minimal effort to restore the previous state of your computer, but yet at the same time doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Any suggestions, recommendations?
In my opinion it will depend on what you are going to be backing the data up to. Another hard drive? CD-Rom? Tape? They all have their pros and cons. The cheapest by far would be to use the Windows Backup program that comes with Windows, if you’re going to be backing up to another hard drive in your system. You set it up, tell it what to back up, where to put it, and when to do it, and off it goes.
If you are going to be writing the data to tape or CD then it will more than likely be done while you’re there if you have more to back up than a tape or CD will hold. In that instance I’d recommend looking at some of the free or shareware backup products out there. I’m sorry that I don’t have the names of any of them, as I stopped using Windows a few years ago.
After looking at various options I think I want a data backup system. It’s a hassle to reinstall all the programs again but that’s something which is not too bad. The main issue is the important data loss. So I’m thinking about something like buying a USB hard drive and backing up MY Documents data and some other folders by scheduling the backup. So mainly I’m looking for a software that will allow me to select different folders to backup, schedule the backup, and the location (USB hard drive in this) where to back it up. Some of the softwares I looked at (Norton ghost for example) are quite expensive ($69.99). I want something cheaper but yet efficient that can run on Windows XP.