How To Make A Cheap Backup of a Hard Drive

The easiest and cheapest way of making backups is with CD or DVD recorder. Another cheap alternative is external hard drive. Both are easy to use to make backup and also easy to use to restore any file. There is also another advantage of this solution: you don't need any special drivers to use backups at some other computer. Advantage of DVDs over hard drive is that you will have many DVD backups comparing to only one drive. This means that you will be able to store DVDs at different locations while to have two independent backups on disks you will need two external hard drives.

You need two different tools. The first one is disk/partition image software. This software will create one file which will contain everything on the disk: operating system, installed software and your data. This image file can be used at any time to recreate the disk. This file will be pretty large. If you will use compression its size will still be in the range of giga bytes. Don't leave this file on your hard drive. If the drive will fail you will also loose the image. Store it on another computer or external hard disk. Here is a list of free disk imaging tools.

The second tool is the actual backup software. This software will copy individual files to the backup destination. The advantage of backup software over manual copying is in the functions that allow you to copy only new or modified files. This way you can each day quickly create a backup of all files without worrying what files need to be copied. Here is a list of free backup and restore software.

A simple backup software is CD/DVD recording software which usually supports sessions. A session is a copy of the selected files but each next session contains only new or modified files.

To be able to quickly restore the files in the case of disk failure you need to do two things. First create an image of the disk. Store the image on another disk or somewhere else. Disk images are usually created after the operating system and the software have been installed. This is a clean state of your computer. The second task is daily (or weekly, depends on your work) backup of the files. This backup complements the disk image. When you will need to restore the disk you would first restore disk image and then all the files from the latest daily backup. Of course, to restore disk image you will need another computer.

You should be aware that your own backup is the cheapest data recovery service. Regular backups of the data will save you time and money.