Backing Up Your Laptop Prevents Needless Nervous Breakdowns
As I’ve been mentioning on and off in the [[Technical]] blog of my website, my laptop has some hard drive connector issues. Gateway finally came through and sent me my new free mylar connector cable after it was back-ordered for a few weeks. Well, because my laptop is so capricious, it’s actually been working for the past few weeks straight without any problems. So in the spirit of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I’ve been waiting until the next failure to install the new cable. What a cheery thought! I’m sure it will happen in some situation where I will desperately need to google the translation of, “Please don’t kidnap me! I’m a grad student and have no money, and I have a rare brain disease and so will not remember any of your faces or the location of your beautiful camp.”
Worst-case situations aside, I have discovered the joy of backing-up my laptop using Acronis TrueImage. With a USB enclosure and a cheap but good 200GB hard drive from www.newegg.com, backing up is a snap. It takes about an hour to back-up my 40GB of data onto about 20GB of archive files on the USB hard drive.
The absolute best thing was the one time when my hard drive connector flaked out, and the computer crashed and took the filesystem with it. Since I’ve been backing-up every week, I had a days-old backup on my USB hard drive. Acronis TrueImage allows you to create a boot CD, so that even if your hard drive is hosed, you can boot from its CD. Then, all you have to do is to connect to your archive files on your USB hard drive, or connect to a Windows share, DVD-Rs, or whatever, and it will completely re-do your entire hard drive to the way it used to be when you backed up. Data, operating system, applications, settings, EVERYTHING will be back the way it was. In an hour. If you’ve ever tried to reinstall your computer from scratch, you know that it takes at least a day’s work, and then even more to remember how you had all of your settings and preferences setup.
I find such data security especially comforting with a laptop, which gets banged around, carried everywhere, and generally abused.
The only down-side with Acronis TrueImage is that it’s a Windows-only application. The boot CD understands Linux filesystems, so conceivably you could make backup images of your linux drives by booting with the boot CD. It seems like a pain to have to bring down your system in order to back it up, though.